


Astral Bodies

by what_alchemy



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Age Regression, Established Relationship, First Time, M/M, Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-15
Updated: 2011-03-15
Packaged: 2017-10-17 00:23:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/170946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim knew what men liked: to possess and destroy. Planets, women, slim-hipped young men mucking out stables as distant Sol browned their glistening skin, it didn’t matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Astral Bodies

Spock extricated himself from Jim with care, mindful of his lover’s sensitivity in the wake of orgasm. Jim gave a sigh at the separation, one hand weakly clutching at Spock’s shoulder. He huffed a soft laugh as Spock paused to commit this image to memory: Jim, panting, flushed, spattered with semen and gazing at Spock with hopeless adoration.

“Oughtta take a holo, Spock.”

Spock did not answer but rose to his knees, stroking down the length of Jim’s torso before leaning down and lapping up the stripes of ejaculate from Jim’s chest and belly. Jim whimpered, tangling one hand in Spock’s hair and using the other to trace the powerful line of Spock’s shoulders. He tried, as much as possible, to soak up through his hands, through touch and muscle memory, the feeling of his union with Spock. Of course there was the physical: smooth skin taut over firm muscles, blazing as though with the heat of tightly controlled Vulcan passions; his clean, masculine scent like a crisp, clear desert night; his dark eyes and hot breath searing with the promise of ownership. Catching Spock’s face between his hands and tugging him up for a deep, explorative kiss, Jim reveled also in the connection beyond their bodies. Spock settled his hips against Jim’s, two spent sets of genitals languishing against one another as the lovers found belonging in the soft swipe of tongues and gentle sucking of lips, in the two mouths that opened and sighed and found each other.

Jim groaned his loss when Spock rose to clean them up.

“You would regret the indulgence when the dried semen tore out your pubic hair, Jim,” Spock admonished him, a pointed look and a raised eyebrow indicating that Spock would never let Jim forget the heady beginnings of their sexual relationship, the bald spot, and the thunderous yelp that had preceded it. Jim, despite his languor, attempted his patented James T. Kirk Smile of Ultimate Seduction. He pouted when Spock remained impassive.

“Just wish we never had to be separate is all.”

“We are not, ashayam.”

The endearment, seldom used between bouts of manliness and the security of their mutual affection, caused Jim’s chest to constrict. He took a deep breath as Spock turned him over and pressed a damp cloth to his asshole, swiping up the length of his crack, wiping away sweat and lube and come. Discarding the cloth, Spock continued to stroke Jim’s backside lightly, a gesture of his appreciation for something that achieved perfection.

“You just love seeing your come in my ass, admit it,” Jim murmured, face pressed into a pillow, voice muffled from amusement clear.

Spock spread Jim’s cheeks to examine the orifice within: raw and red with their exertions, leaking semen, hot to touch. Spock smoothed a gentle thumb over Jim’s anus, soothing the lingering discomfort. His penis made a valiant skyward effort but was ignored.

“Yes, it moves me to see evidence of our coupling. As you are aware of all my sexual proclivities, you are aware of this one. Logic dictates that if you have such data, my ‘admitting it,’ as you say, could not further your knowledge, merely confirm it.”

Jim laughed and sat up, turned to put his arms around his lover and clutch him to himself tightly. They fell back against the bed and the pillows in a tangled embrace, and Jim said into Spock’s mussed black hair, “Call my desire for periodic verbal confirmation of previously held knowledge an illogical human foible, if you want.”

Spock hummed into the space he occupied between Jim’s neck and shoulder. “Curious,” he said, eyes fluttering shut, “the emotional needs of a human.”

Jim’s hand on Spock’s head catalogued the thick, silky quality of his hair, the commitment to memory now an automatic, unconscious reaction to being in Spock’s presence. Jim knew it was greedy, that his love was possessive and consuming like a collapsing star, but still he wanted, needed more. Needed his hands and his mouth all over Spock’s body, his cock in Spock’s mouth, his ass full of Spock’s come, his face covered by Spock’s fiery fingertips and their minds blending in long, interminable eternities called moments. He needed the oneness of their union in body, mind and heart. He ached for their consumptive singularity.

The stars blazed just outside the impenetrable tempered glass of the bedroom window. Space so vast and clear, so swallowing in its omnipresence, seemed to Jim to pause in recognition of their love, as if meeting its equal in enormity. _Yes,_ Jim thought as his breathing evened and deepened, eyes closing. _It’s as if even space knows it’s got nothing on us._

“Spock,” he whispered, neither sleeping nor awake now. Spock grunted from his position on Jim’s chest, drowsy and disinclined to move.

“We’re bigger than space.”

Spock did not answer, whether due to sleep or the inherent dilemma or answering such illogic, it could not be ascertained.

“Sometimes I wish,” Jim continued, mumbling and unaware, “that you were the first one. To be inside. That what we have could be the only thing I’ve ever had. This feeling bigger than space, the only feeling. Untainted. Instead. I wish, sometimes. Is all.”

Great stars that dwarfed both Eridani and Sol rushed past them as the _Enterprise_ cruised at a leisurely pace through friendly space to her next mission. Great stars flashed their fortunes at having met their equals.

*

Jim became aware of an oppressive heat choking him away from sleep. Covered by a sweaty sheet, he gasped, scrambling to get out from under the tangle, away from the heat bearing down on him. With a frustrated grunt, he finally gained purchase, sitting up on his knees and flinging the offending sheet away. He paused at the unfamiliar surroundings.

“Holy shit,” he muttered, gazing out the window into wide open space, studded brightly with an infinite number of stars. He jumped up and pressed himself against the glass, careless of his nudity.

“Computer!” he called. “What is my location?”

A tinny, automated female voice answered, “Captain’s quarters on the starship _Enterprise_ NCC-1701, Captain Kirk.”

Jim couldn’t decide between gaping at the view or gaping at what he’d just heard. He looked down at his naked body. Encountering nothing out of the ordinary, he said, “Computer, what is the star date?”

“2262.71.”

“Oh, balls.”

Jim hurried into what appeared to be the bathroom and met his own familiar reflection. He was as he’d expected: coltish, a bit gangly, perhaps too thin, hoping to fill out in the next few years. Hoping to gain back what he’d lost, knowing he asked for the impossible. Rings the color of fading bruises shadowed his eyes. He averted his gaze, the weight of too much knowledge making him falter. With his back to the mirror now, he leaned against the cool column of the sink and took a few deep breaths as he’d been taught in Federation-sponsored therapy.

Suddenly a door slid open – not the door he’d come though in, he noted with mounting panic – and a tall, imposing Vulcan with no facial expression strode in. And stopped as soon as he caught sight of Jim. Jim moved to cover his exposed genitals even as he maintained eye contact with the Vulcan, who was now openly gawking in what Jim was fairly sure was a terrible breach of Vulcan decorum.

“Captain – Jim, are you quite all right?” came the deep voice, a little aghast, Jim imagined.

“I’m naked.”

The Vulcan hastened to hand Jim a towel before averting his eyes quite pointedly.

“Please explain.”

Laughter bubbled unbidden from Jim’s throat.

“Explain?” he echoed, voice rising in pitch, edging on hysteria. “You explain! Why am I thirteen years in the future being called _captain!_ Who are you? Why are you in my bathroom? What’s happening?” Jim had begun to shake, clutching the towel he’d wrapped around his hips in nervous fists.

The Vulcan seemed to have snapped out of his unbecoming stupor, stepping into the captain’s quarters and slapping a comm device on the wall.

“Spock to McCoy. Come in McCoy.” He kept his eyes trained on Jim. Or rather, on Jim’s shoulder.

“Jesus, Spock, do you know what time it is?”

“The captain is having an emergency, please come to his quarters immediately. Spock out.”

“Spock! Spock, what _kind_ of emergency, goddamnit?”

“Unknown. Come immediately. Spock out.”

The Vulcan rummaged through a closet and Jim took a cautious step out of the bathroom after several calming breaths. When the Vulcan – Spock – emerged it was with a t-shirt and pajama pants. A little too large, Jim noted, shrugging and shuffling into them, but they would do. As for Spock the Vulcan, he seemed to adjust his own clothes, sleek, unforgiving Starfleetwear, and stared unwaveringly at a spot just to the left of Jim’s head.

“So you’re a Vulcan,” Jim put out into the ensuing silence.

“Affirmative.”

“And you just wander into your captain’s bathroom, your captain who happens to be me.”

Here the Vulcan named Spock met his gaze. He could discern nothing in them.

“It is a shared bathroom, Mr. Kirk.”

In a flurry of crashes, beeping and expletives, a scruffy, harried looking man with eyes bloodshot from interrupted sleep entered the quarters and Jim’s personal space all at once. Jim began taking gulping breathes that did not ease his discomfort.

“Jim, what the hell happened to you?”

“Hey, stop, stop, don’t –” Jim began pushing the man away from him, pressing himself against the bulkheads, squeezing his eyes shut.

Immediately the man backed off, hands raised in surrender. He glanced at the Vulcan, who managed an even graver expression than the one Jim assumed he’d been born with.

“All right Jim. It’s okay, I’m not even near you. Listen. Just tell me what happened.”

Jim looked at the two of them: the stiff-necked Vulcan in starched science blues, the Southern man with a day’s worth of beard growth and a whirring tricorder. Jim grasped for familiarity but met only vapors where he imagined memories should be.

“I don’t know. Woke up here,” he said. Then he added, “naked.”

“I’m Dr. McCoy. This is Commander Spock. Tell me how old you are.”

Jim swallowed, remembering a time when the answer to that demand, among others, determined whether you lived or died. He felt no menace from McCoy, but he’d felt none from Kodos either, in the early days that make him sick to think about now for their bright optimism. He could not remember this ship, being a captain, knowing these two very different men, but he could remember that his age in experience defied his age in years.

“Old enough,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”

If the doctor looked a bit sad at Jim’s declaration, Jim chose to ignore it. He hated people’s pity, the bitterness like a fire in his gullet.

“He stated earlier that he found himself thirteen years in the future, doctor. Assuming he ascertained the current star date, I speculate that the captain is approximately sixteen Terran years of age.”

Studying his tricorder, McCoy frowned deeply and nodded. He looked about ready to dispense good advice. Jim began to fidget, feeling enclosed in the space of the quarters he could not remember as his own, encroached upon by these strange men who looked at him with such concern and disappointment. He focused his eyes on the door McCoy had busted in through. He knew there was no getting off this starship, but surely there had to be someplace with more _space,_ somewhere he could stretch out his _arms,_ somewhere less godawful _hot_ —

“….and you could stand for some more protein in your diet, drink some fortified milk too. You know, I might have some down in sickbay stashed away for a special occasion, the real deal, not this reconstituted, regurgitate, replicated sh-- ….garbage. Whattaya say, Jim, some nice Devarsian goats’ milk, fresh outta sickbay’s fridger?” McCoy was attempting to smile; it was more unsettling than the Vulcan’s flat, blank nonexpression.

“I believe Mr. Kirk would benefit from a walk around the _Enterprise_ , Dr. McCoy,” Spock said. The doctor shot him a sour look.

“You can be in charge of that, Mr. Sleep-is-for-the-weak. I’m running these readings down to sickbay and cursing the day I met you people until Alpha starts. We’ll need to debrief the senior staff at the start of shift and find a way to fix this.” McCoy turned from the Vulcan and rounded his fire-eyed wrath on Jim. “And you! Don’t think you’re off the hook, kid. You come down to sickbay as soon as this hobgoblin’s done giving you the grand tour and we’re having a talk about your diet.”

With as much fanfare as he’d arrived, McCoy exited the captain’s quarters, and Jim was left, once again, with Spock. Spock, whose silent presence was like a black hole sucking all the air out of Jim’s lungs, the room, the hallway and the whole ship if Jim wasn’t quick. He ducked out of the sliding doors McCoy had forced open and took a deep breath. The Vulcan regarded him with unreadable black eyes from inside the captain’s quarters.

“I can look around on my own,” Jim told him, itching to leave this weird alien with his watchful gaze and lack of inflection. “You must have duties to attend to, so.”

“My duties, Mr. Kirk, include keeping myself appraised of your status. You will not be left alone.”

Jim felt fear lick up his spine. He tried to quell it; after all, what was one flint-eyed Vulcan in comparison to the innumerable horrors he’d already faced?

*

McCoy sat, feet propped up on his desk in his office, with the padd in his lap opened to Captain James Kirk’s confidential health file. He stared through it without seeing, one hand cupping his haphazardly-shaven chin He paid no heed to the few drops of blood beading up where he’d nicked himself. It didn’t matter that he knew this file as well as he knew his secret liquor stash. It would tell him nothing new, nothing he was not already aware of as Jim’s doctor and Jim’s friend. But the file was a clinical recitation of facts, a digitized document that could not capture the acrid stench of thousands of bodies piled in the Tarsus sun; could not transmit the cold, clenching burn of a stomach empty for weeks, months; could not reveal the all-consuming fear of being caught or the depth of the blackest miasma of guilt and grief. Snarling, McCoy flung the padd on his desk, dashing it against the bulkhead.

“Damnit, Jim!” he cursed. He heard a gamma shift nurse scurry to the far side of sickbay to cower for the remainder of his shift. McCoy took a deep breath, squeezing his eyes shut for the duration. Leaning forward, he wrote out in old-fashioned pen and paper – _more permanent, more immediate, more truthful,_ he thought – the facts:

James T. Kirk, Captain. Regressed in body and mind to age 16  
Cause: unknown  
Immediate medical issues: malnutrition, stress response  
Immediate command issues: en route to Zenzobar of the Third Outer Ring for trade negotiations, Captain Kirk directly requested by Supreme Empress H’Lopia.  
ETA: 72 hours.  
Treatment:

McCoy sat tapping his pen into the corner of the page for countless minutes, seeing nothing. The gamma shifters left and Chapel loomed in the doorway of his office looking statuesque and well-rested, damn her.

“There a gnat in your britches, doctor?” Chapel’s voice was sly. He scowled at her.

“For that, and not getting me a coffee, you get babysitting duty.”

“Excuse me?” she huffed, looking harassed. McCoy let himself feel a tingle of satisfaction.

“Jim’s been turned into a teenaged angst bomb. You get to mind him while Spock and I debrief the senior staff.”

“What am I supposed to do with baby Captain?”

“I don’t know, Christine. Make him clean the head with a toothbrush if it strikes your fancy.”

McCoy did not examine the unholy gleam in his head nurse’s eyes before he gathered his weary bones and trundled himself up to the bridge.

*

“Okay, so, let’s get our timeline under control here,” Sulu said, setting his padd onto the table of the meeting room. The core bridge crew was there, along with Dr. McCoy, Mr. Scott and Lieutenant Giotto from security. Chekov sighed, familiar with Sulu’s love of lists: making them, reading them, making Chekov read them, imagining that they at all helped him organize his thoughts and actions. “Mr. Spock, you said you and the captain went to bed around 2300 hours? Sir?” Glancing up for confirmation, he took Spock’s stony discomfort as such, and inserted ‘went to “bed”’ into the slot for 2300. “And you say you woke up at 0400 for, quote, ‘meditation and optimal productivity,’ is that correct?”

“Yes, Lieutenant, we have repeated the facts three times now. I was not present for the Captain’s regression. We must move on to finding a solution to his dilemma before we reach orbit around Zenzobar of the Third Outer Ring, and, barring that, we must focus on completing the upcoming mission without him in command.”

“Spock, the Supreme Empress is no one to take lightly,” Uhura said. “She was really forceful about the Captain’s presence.” She looked hesitant for a moment. “We may have no choice but to send him in as is.”

“Hey now –” McCoy began.

“Lieutenant, that is not an option,” Spock said. “The Captain’s mental state and maturity level are --”

“The Keptin, he is sixteen, not so much younger from me at the beginning, but I think the Keptin and me, we are very different sixteens.”

“Goddamnit, now, are we really talking about sending—”

“Can we focus on this list?”

“I think tempers are running a wee bit high right now, maybe we should stop for a snack?”

Suddenly Giotto stood and slammed his heavy fists on the table. Everyone shut up and stared at him.

“We have about three days to get Sunshine all growed up again,” he said, mouth set in a tight line. “It’s smooth sailing to the outer rings, and we are all of us the best of the best in our departments, and we will goddamn well find a way to fix this before the mini captain even has a chance to mess up these negotiations for us. Now do you people want to panic and argue about something we have days to find a solution for or do you want to get this done?”

It was the most anyone outside of security had ever heard Giotto speak. Spock recovered first.

“Indeed, Lieutenant Giotto makes a logical argument. The available resources in the science and medical departments will assess any anomalies in Mr. Kirk’s physical condition—”

“That’s just it Spock, I’ve been over it a hundred times. There are no anomalies. He could stand to gain a few but otherwise, there _are_ no physical problems. He’s a perfectly fine sixteen year old kid.”

“I would thank you, doctor, not to interrupt me.” Spock managed to go even more upright. McCoy thought that if that spine didn’t snap by itself, he might have to snap it for the green-blooded bastard himself. McCoy clenched his jaw and said nothing. “As I was saying, the science and medical teams will share relevant data in the attempt to understand and reverse Mr. Kirk’s regression. What is it, Mr. Sulu?”

Sulu put down is hand.

“I know I’m beating a dead horse, sir… Um, unnecessarily reiterating the issue, but I really think we’re missing something between 2300 and 0500 when you found the Captain in his current condition. The list could help. If you can think of anything out of the ordinary, sir.”

“Leave the list,” Chekov hissed at him.

“Mr. Sulu, while I admire your attention to detail as a helmsman and crew member, I must remind you that I have an eidetic memory, and I assure you, the timeline you have developed is accurate and comprehensive.”

Sulu sat back in his chair with a sigh.

“What about crew morale?” Uhura asked after a moment of subdued silence. “Should the captain’s condition be common knowledge or are we keeping it hush hush for now?”

“He won’t be confined to quarters,” McCoy said. “It’d be torture for him, and I don’t see the point. The crew will find out, might as well tell them outright and not have some kind of mass freak out on board.”

“Do you think this will happen to anyone else?” Chekov asked.

“No, this kind of crap only happens to Jim Kirk, I swear.”

“It is a possibility, Ensign. Which is why we must find the solution as quickly as possible. As Acting Captain, I will make the announcement to the crew as a whole, inform Starfleet Command, and give the science and medical teams their new assignments. Lieutenant Giotto, you will lead security sweeps on all decks and increase detail in traffic-heavy areas, particularly near officers’ quarters. Meeting dismissed.”

*

After a few hours of regaling him with tales of curious and vile space diseases, Nurse Chapel plied Jim with a reconstituted cheeseburger for lunch and a trip to an observation deck. He knew he was a cheap date, but the observation deck afforded a far more spectacular view than the veritable porthole in the captain’s quarters, not to mention that it was a wide open space with plenty of comfortable furniture as well as private nooks for when a guy might like to be alone with himself. Or with someone else. But he could walk around the entire deck, look around himself, and see nothing but the stars burning lightyears away in all directions. A person could _breathe_ on this observation deck.

Jim leaned against a railing at the far end of the deck, casting a sideways glance at his taciturn companion. After telling him about degenerative interspecies STDs, she seemed to have nothing else to say to him. “So,” he fished for a conversation topic, “you like being a nurse in space?”

“I suppose it’s a little more interesting than treating overdoses and aircar crash victims like I did before I joined up at the academy. Theoretically, I’ll put in a few more years and get my MD after this mission’s over. Xenobiology, and all.” She was looking at him more closely. Trying, he realized, to recognize the man she knew in the boy she saw.

“Am I like him, then?”

“You _are_ him, so. I mean, you’re the same person.”

“Yeah, but he’s done all this stuff,” Jim said, gesturing outward as if he’d been to each star system he could see and had performed feats of heroics he couldn’t remember at all of them.

Chapel turned back toward the stars, but she saw only Jim’s gaunt face in the tempered glass, the startling blue of his eyes. They were the eyes of someone who refused to be a victim, the eyes of a survivor, the eyes of her captain. She chose her words carefully.

“Jim, somewhere in the trajectory of your life you’ve had to find a well of strength and resolve. Sometimes you might feel weak, or helpless, or powerless, but you have risen to the challenge and come out alive every time. The captain is strong, and passionate, and loud, and colorful, and full of life, and he was shaped by all you’ve endured, all that’s come before and all you’ll still face. You are the reason he’s a great man right now.”

Jim leaned his forehead against the cool glass. He didn’t feel like the blueprints of a great man. He felt as though by existing in this present, his future, he was robbing himself of a bright life darting about among the stars, a relic from the past tainting everything to come. He had the curious and paradoxical desire to erase himself so that this shining future where he had friends and inspired loyalty could be secure. He didn’t even know this forthright woman in pressed nursing scrubs who stood by his side comforting him, who looked wary that he might want a hug but was prepared to give one if it became necessary. He suddenly didn’t want her to know him, to know how he really was in the private recesses of his mind. Decayed, and depraved, and so needy after so much loss.

“I think I want to go back to my quarters. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I can get there myself,” he said, stepping away from her. She frowned.

“Jim, let me walk you there, at least.”

“Look, I know you just have your orders or whatever, but I swear I won’t tell McCoy, and I’m pretty sure the Captain will go easy on you when he’s back.”

“Jim, wait.” She followed him with long-legged strides. He realized that he’d have to run if he wanted to get away from her. “Look, I’m sorry if what I laid on you back there was heavy. But I know you’re not a kid and I know you can handle it. Let me walk you back to your quarters.”

“I’m not –”

“What?”

“I’m not good.”

Chapel stared at him, at the defiant tilt of his chin, the set of his jaw not yet squared by manhood, the glinting eyes and determined mouth. He declared his lack of goodness not with resignation or sadness, but as a gauntlet thrown down at the feet of detractors. He spat it out as if it were a poison that should make her recoil. But Chapel had a strong constitution, and she had seen her share of the darkness residing deeply within all sentient beings. Some more than others.

“Evil touches you. I know that.” She walked past him then, leading the way. “Come on.”

*

Spock’s duties as acting captain kept him from performing in his capacity as science officer, and therefore kept him from working with the science department on finding a cure for his bondmate. He knew he was being derelict in his duties even now; 74% of his thoughts were occupied by the puzzle of Jim’s condition. Further, he contemplated his off duty hours, commencing in just 37.3 minutes: should he attempt to spend them with Jim, who could not hide his fear and contempt for Spock, but who nonetheless needed someone who understood him fully, or should he assist in the search for a solution with the science team, increasing their productivity and chances of success? He was aware of an increased pressure to restore Jim’s age, as Admiral Komack, surly even in his text transmissions, demanded that they send Jim into negotiations on Zenzobar regardless of his condition. He ruminated on his options until –

“I wish you would shut up about the lists!” Spock’s keen ears picked up Chekov’s irritated hissing from the helm. “They do not help you, only make you procrastinate! You think you are doing something but you are not, Hikaru! I wish -- ”

Spock stood abruptly.

“Lieutenant Sulu, you have the conn.”

In the corridors crew members gave their acting captain wide berth as he made haste with his characteristic grace toward sickbay and Dr. McCoy.

He rapped on the door to McCoy’s office and did not fidget waiting for McCoy to let him in.

“Dr. McCoy—”

“All I’ve been able to find is some obscure reference to some fountain of youth in Devar XI, but Christ, we were there almost a month ago –”

“McCoy.”

“I mean, I guess it could be a delayed reaction or something, but I don’t reckon--”

“Doctor, cease your illogical prattle at once.”

McCoy’s jaw snapped shut and he finally looked up from the text of the padd in is lap.

“What?”

“I believe I have been remiss in… completing Lieutenant Sulu’s list.”

“Hold on, hold on –” McCoy stood, meeting Spock’s gaze levelly. “You’re saying….you made a mistake?”

“Doctor—”

“You? The great and mighty infallible pointy-eared Vulcan god? A mistake?”

“A small omission and nothing more, Dr. McCoy. Are you more interested in gloating or in saving your captain from a second adolescence?”

“I’m listening, oh fallen one.”

Spock straightened, clasping his hands behind his back and fixing his eyes on a point on the bulkhead behind the doctor.

“As we fell asleep, the captain spoke to me of wishes. I did not give credence at the time to words spoken as if in dreams.”

McCoy crossed his arms, a square hand coming up to squeeze his chin. He frowned when the silence after Spock’s statement stretched.

“You have to keep talking or it still doesn’t mean anything, Spock.”

“It is private.”

McCoy threw his hands up and gave a grunt of disgust. “Spock! You goddamned infuriating Vulcan, I’m a doctor, not a psychic! If this is relevant, you have to tell me!”

Spock managed to straighten further.

“He expressed a desire that I…be first. In his mind and body both.”

McCoy gave no reaction. “And?”

“He wished, as in Terran tradition, on a star. On a great number of stars whose energies are yet unknown to us.”

McCoy’s lips parted.

“I’ll be damned. He’s a virgin at sixteen?”

“Doctor, you make light of this.”

“Okay, okay. But you’re the scienciest scientist this side of the Velubian system, and you’re telling me Jim is a nubile young thing again because he made a wish like some nineteenth century damsel in distress? And some unknown invisible hand of the universe was just dispensing wishes like candy to starship captains last night?”

“I am not ‘saying’ anything. I am providing evidence that was previously overlooked.”

McCoy sat down heavily, shuffling papers and padds into piles that passed for neat on his desk.

“Okay, so let’s look at this from your proposed angle. Jim wished it, therefore it is so. How the hell do we fix it? Wish really hard?”

“The answer is fairly obvious if we follow the hypothesis to its natural conclusion, doctor.”

McCoy did not look at him. He propped his elbows on his desk and clasped his hands in front of his face.

“That boy is in no state to be manhandled by the likes of you, Spock.”

“Doctor—”

“No, just hear me out on this one,” McCoy said in a gruff voice. “I’m happy for you guys. Big crazy love and all that, it’s good. Jim deserves it. Hell, you deserve it, and I will deny ever saying that if you go around telling people, you walking computer. The universe may have spit out the last version of Jim to ever be a virgin and delivered him into your hot little hands, but we both know what he’s still recovering from, we both know he’s not well, and I’ll be damned, Spock, if I stand by and let you take advantage of him while he’s like this. Not to mention the fact that he’s underage.”

“Technically, doctor, he is 29.36 standard years of age. He was born in 2233; it is now 2262.”

“You can’t even convince yourself of that logic.”

Spock shifted his gaze from McCoy to the sundry medical implements adorning McCoy’s office. Ancient saws and cruel blades. Reminders, he knew, of the medical field’s barbaric past. Reminders to be thankful for modern conveniences, and reminders never to cease progress toward the easing of human suffering.

“I am uncertain as to the course of action when we have found the solution, but it is morally untenable. In the Standard vernacular, ‘the cure is worse than the disease.’ The condition remains impossible to resolve.”

“It might not be the only solution. Hell, it might not be the solution at all, Spock. There must be something organic to blame, we just haven’t looked hard enough. Why are we only seeing zebras here?”

“I do not understand the reference to an extinct earth mammal in this context.”

“I just mean, Spock, that you’ve jumped to the most far-fetched conclusion possible when there must be some simpler explanation.”

“Doctor, your insults are tiresome. I have offered a hypothesis that would explain the captain’s condition and what would reverse it, whereas you have merely read thousand year old fairy tales from a planet whose inhabitants prize goats above children.”

“Look at yourself, Spock! An imprecise, hyperbolical statement? All that Vulcan logic out the window the moment Jim might be threatened. Just like every time you put yourself between him and phaser fire. If you can’t think clearly, Mr. Spock, mark my words, I will pull you off duty to get a hold of yourself.”

“Is that a threat, Dr. McCoy?”

“It’s a goddamned _promise_ , Spock. Now get out of my sickbay.”

*

When Jim got back to the captain’s quarters, a yeoman had been by to tidy up, but domestic upkeep did nothing for the smell. Nothing unpleasant or even illicit, just – he knew what a room that was his alone smelled like. He shared this space with someone on a regular basis, maybe even a permanent basis, and when he pressed open the doors of the closet, he found crisp blue shirts among command gold. Whirling around, he crossed the room to reach a bookshelf where some holos flickered, propped up against books and bulkheads. There were a few of him grinning, arms slung around a scowling Dr. McCoy; the locations varied but the expressions did not. Sharing space and intimacy with the beleaguered doctor suddenly seemed a very real possibility. There was one holo of Sam and – Sam’s family, Jim realized with wonder. A few displayed groups shots of people who must be part of his crew. But the holos that made the air thin and his head dizzy were of Spock. The first was a portrait of Spock almost in profile, head and shoulders occupying the frame, that Vulcan ear a delicately tapered arch, eyes downcast as if in deep concentration of something off-camera, perhaps even unaware that it had captured him in so exposed a moment. The only other holo of Spock was also a candid shot that showed Spock and Jim leaning close to one another in conversation, oblivious to their surroundings and even their observer. They did not touch, but the riveted quality of the energy between them gave Jim the sensation that his stomach had flipped. Those weren’t Dr. McCoy’s blue shirts in his closet, it wasn’t Dr. McCoy in his bathroom easy as he pleased this morning, and it wasn’t Dr. McCoy whose personal smells now mingled with his own in this room, that combined scent the palpable manifestation of their intimate association.

Quickly Jim turned the holos of Spock around to face the collection of books he _did_ recognize. Spock, the Vulcan with the wooden expression and the smoldering eyes. Did Spock know him, really? Was Spock aware of how damaged he was in thought and deed? _I must have lied,_ Jim thought. _I must have lied and he has no idea what I am and if he did he wouldn’t be here._ Jim swallowed back the rising nausea. _Great man, my ass._

He went back over to the window where he watched the stars flicker in the distance. He realized he had no idea of his exact location in the galaxy, or even that of their destination. He had vague knowledge of the outer rings being small, rocky planets on the border between the second and third quadrants, rich in precious gems and sitting on top of a store of dilithium crystals, but not much else. Jim realized he was very far from Earth and thought of his mother for the first time. But her visage was bitter and pinched and silent in his memory, and he forced her down like bile.

The image of his future self with Spock was not as easily tamed. The alien he found so disquieting occupied this bed with him. Conjecture indicated that here in this room Spock had held him, kissed him, taken ownership of him, kept him from the consuming blackness. He had sudden insight into what he must do: to secure his future and keep the happiness he’d seen on his own face in all those holos, he must not let Spock see the depths of depravity and despair he plumbed in the darkest hollows of himself, must not let Spock see all that he’d done when he’d run out of options on a putrid planet just an arm’s reach from hell. Must not let Spock see and know and leave.

Jim knew what men liked: to possess and destroy. Planets, women, slim-hipped young men mucking out stables as distant Sol browned their glistening skin, it didn’t matter. And Jim could imagine, had read about and jacked off to, all the depraved acts that could keep them satisfied. Satisfied and disinclined to asking questions. He saw himself reflected in the glass, superimposed among the stars, a reedy, fatherless thing desperately searching for comfort, for immolation, for anything that could eradicate the crawling darkness inside him. Maybe Spock would even make it good for him, if they’d been together a long time. If a Vulcan could care.

Settling into the bed, Jim hugged a pillow to himself, and when he slept, he dreamed that the stars were eyes that judged.

*

Spock’s long strides faltered as he rounded the corridor of the officers’ quarters toward the captain’s and first officer’s. While he kept the first officer’s quarters for workspace, meditation, storage of his few belongings, and periods of necessary solitude, he had not truly stayed in them for 2.7 years. He hesitated at the captain’s door before knocking.

The door glided open at Jim’s command, but Spock had not expected that he would be propped up in bed, sheets pooled around his hips, blinking at him with bleary recognition through the open partition.

“I apologize. I did not know you were resting. I can return at a more convenient time, if you wish.”

“No. No, um, it’s fine, don’t worry. Stay.”

Jim didn’t move, nor did Spock, standing in the wider space of the living area and gazing unobstructed at the boy whom his bondmate had become. The boy from whom his bondmate had grown. He felt conflict at the thought of his hypothesis’s conclusion. He did not wish to commit morally reprehensible acts upon an underaged body and mind unable to consent by law, yet he could not deny the appeal of his bondmate’s current – previous? – lithe young form. If his conclusion required ethical justification, he told himself that his mind and blood would not cleave to this Jim, indeed, to any being too young to consent, without the existing anchor of their bond, the strength of their union. Spock had erected his shields the moment he found Jim naked in the head, but a cursory exploration at the edges of his mind provided Spock with the familiar thrum of Jim’s mood: apprehension and arousal in equal parts. Spock closed himself out again, unwilling to use his superior telepathic abilities to his own advantage.

They did not speak but continued to regard each other from different rooms. Spock saw in Jim’s expression the moment he made a decision, spurring him to push aside the sheets and swing his legs onto the floor.

“You and me are together, right?”

“Indeed, we are both occupying the captain’s quarters at this time, Mr. Kirk.”

Jim rolled his eyes, sitting up straighter.

“No, you know what I mean. We’re like, boyfriends, or whatever.”

“We are bonded in the Vulcan form of marriage.”

Jim’s eyes widened. Spock realized he had been expecting a more casual relationship, perhaps of the sort common to human teenagers. “Oh,” he said, seeming to lose his nerve and looking down at his hands.

“Perhaps you would enjoy a refreshment, Mr. Kirk? In the past, your adult self interfered with the engineering of the replicator and it now dispenses a favored beverage, lemonade. I am told it is a passable facsimile.”

Jim peered at him from inside the bedroom, assessing. He padded barefoot out into the living space to join Spock at the table, sliding in across from where Spock had taken a seat. Spock input a request for a mild tea and a cold lemonade and waited, feeling Jim’s gaze appraise him.

“So how long have we been Vulcan married?”

“Two years, four months, twenty days, four hours and…. thirteen minutes.”

“Huh. And were we together before? I mean, were we in a mutually satisfying monogamous romantic relationship beneficial to both parties? Before.”

“Indeed, Mr. Kirk, our relationship commenced approximately one and a half standard years before our bonding.”

“Approximately.”

“There is disagreement as to the exact date of commencement.”

“And do you call me Mr. Kirk the whole time? Because I gotta say, more than a little kinky.” Spock noted that the patented James T. Kirk Smile of Ultimate Seduction was in its infancy and not terribly effective.

“I can call you James, if you prefer,” Spock said mildly, knowing Jim associated the use of his given name with impending punishment. Jim looked suitably sour at the prospect.

“Why not just Jim?”

“Very well. Jim. And you may call me Spock.”

Jim looked amused. “As if I’d call you anything else, _Acting Captain._ ” Spock’s control did not slip even as Jim’s words and tone unwittingly echoed their interactions during the _Narada_ incident, unsettling him.

The replicator chimed and Spock set Jim’s lemonade in front of him before carefully handling his own cup of tea. Jim continued to study Spock, scanning his features as if for any flicker of recognition or feeling. He began to fidget as the silence persisted.

“Any progress on making me old again?”

“There have been two…theories.”

“Oh, so what are they?”

“They are confidential at the moment.”

“Oh come on! I’m the subject right, so how can you not tell me? What is it, electroshock treatment or something? I think I could take it.”

“There will be no electroshock treatments, Jim.”

“Then what?”

Spock chose a proven method of defense: prevaricate and distract. “Theories must be tested, Jim. If one proves sound, we will implement it. Would you care for a game of tri-dimensional chess?”

*

By the time Jim and Spock had finished two games, Jim was unable to conceal his admiration for Spock, and, by extension, his future self for managing to marry Spock.  
The novelty of having found someone who not only challenged him but beat him had not waned in the face of defeat. Spock also had a staggering breadth of knowledge in a variety of subjects ranging from Federation-wide historical events (though he made no reference to the one Jim hated and knew most intimately) to the social castes of the tree people of Kartasia III. Plus, he might never be a stand up comedian, but after a few suspicious comments, Jim had the feeling he’d spent a lot of time catching his breath laughing in Spock’s presence.

Of course, Jim was not one to overlook the fact of Spock’s striking appearance. Alien, yes, with his upswept brows and the ears that required no mention, the blood pumping green beneath porcelain skin, but Jim had lost his grip on what so disturbed him about Spock that morning. Spock was totally masculine in his beauty, nothing soft or curved in the sharp lines of his face and body. And Jim could sense power there, pulsating tightly coiled and deceptive in the lean sinews of Spock’s spare form. He found that as the afternoon subsided into evening, more and more he craved that potent might, burned with biting urgency for oblivion in Spock’s immersive presence.

He’d felt this before in the company of powerful men, his frantic heart forcing overheated blood southward in eager teenaged optimism. Only a tenuous thread of anxiety had kept Jim from slithering like a low, begging thing into the beds of such men: Hank, his mom’s chief farmhand, whose fading prison tattoos stretched over burly muscles used for a lifetime of labor; Coach Nunez, who’d never stopped asking him to join the wrestling team even after he’d been barred from extracirriculars altogether for truancy; Mark Song, who had his own holding cell at the Riverside police station and served him drinks on the sly at the Orbit with a dangerous glint in his black eyes.

Jim frowned at the planes of the chess board, hardly seeing where Spock mounted his offensive on Jim’s queen. Spock was not like those men. Spock was… his husband. His husband who was being kind to him, and making clever jokes, and playing chess with him. No, Spock was not to be counted in their company.

A comm device whistled.

“McCoy to Spock.”

“Spock here.”

“I’d like you and Jim to come to the mess for dinner. I need Jim eating specific food.”

Spock met Jim’s eyes over the game. Jim shrugged his assent.

“We will leave immediately, doctor. Spock out.”

Jim hopped to his feet and stood near the closet.

“I should wear something better than pajamas, maybe,” he said, pressing the door open. He rifled through the civvies pushed to the far left of the closet for something where he wouldn’t look like a scrawny kid playing dress-up with his dad’s clothes. He found a pair of jeans that might fit him; his future self appeared to favor tight jeans a size or two down, and these might drag on the floor a bit but he could pull them off. With a furtive glance at Spock, who still sat straight up and proper at the work table they’d been playing on, Jim shucked the black cotton pants Spock had handed him in the morning and turned toward the closet, ostensibly for modesty, but really to display his bare ass as he stepped slowly into the denim. When he turned back around, zipping up the fly, Spock had clasped his hands on the table and appeared to be resolutely studying the game he’d all but won. Smirking, Jim made a show of stripping off the oversized white t-shirt and slipping into one of the snug black Starfleet issue undershirts. If he failed at putting on a stunning show of grace, he chose to ignore it and announced that he was ready to go.

In the mess hall, McCoy sat at a corner table opposite Nurse Chapel. When Jim and Spock joined them, Jim sliding in next to Chapel and Spock next to McCoy, McCoy slid a tray of food at Jim with perhaps more force than necessary.

“I wanna see you eat all of that,” he said, jabbing a finger towards the tray. Jim looked down to see slices of a large steak lying on a bed of dark greens. A cup of replicated fruit sat in the right corner, and a stubby breadstick in the left. For dessert Jim got a –

“Yogurt, are you serious right now?”

“It’s key lime flavored,” McCoy growled.

When Jim turned his eyes on Spock for support, Spock only said, “The doctor is an expert in nutrition.”

Jim looked at Chapel then, meeting only an incredulous look accompanied by a shake of her blonde head. With a sigh, he speared a slice of steak, catching greens on the end of his fork and shoveling the entire mass into his face with barely contained gusto. Truthfully, he still felt profound relief to behold food in all its forms. He kept up the dessert racket to comfort the adults who so often hovered over him, not only wanting him to eat and smile and achieve, but to be as spoiled and entitled a teenager as the sullen youths who crowded deserted drug store parking lots and sneered at passersby unworthy of their august presence. It passed for normal, made his mother feign exasperation, deflected from the putrescence roiling in his gut and his spirit. Jim ate quickly and silently, McCoy and Chapel bickered over sickbay rosters and reconstituted grapes and the ethics of treating such and such a people for this and that foul parasite while Spock interjected every so often to tell them they were being illogical. But Spock’s eyes and attention stayed on Jim, who felt impossibly young and laid bare under the weight of that unwavering gaze.

*

Spock was jostled awake in the darkness of the first officer’s quarters by a cool, lissome, _naked_ body sliding into his bed. He went rigid at the intrusion, at the chill press of human skin and – _desire destruction need shame admiration_ – emotion against the entire length of him.

“Jim,” he hissed, the short syllable swallowed as if it never was when Jim sealed his pliant mouth over Spock’s and forced his tongue past Spock’s teeth. “Mmmph,” Spock grunted, moving to sit up. Jim was a limpet clasping Spock’s body in a trap of spindly limbs. Spock wrenched his mouth away and heaved in the breath stolen from him, holding Jim’s bony shoulders steady.

“Come on, Spock,” Jim whispered, his voice hoarse. His lips were parted for quick breaths, his eyes large and intense and expectant in the dark, his hand flexing in the hair at the back of Spock’s head, urging him forward. “I can make you feel good. Please, Spock.” Thwarted by Spock’s unyielding hold on his shoulders, Jim gave an experimental roll of his hips.

“No,” Spock said in his firmest voice, even as his body betrayed him. This was his bondmate so wantonly straddled atop him, wanting him, and his blood did not deliberate on Jim’s regressed physical state. Jim ground with more confidence into Spock’s traitorous lap.

“I know you want it, Spock. I can feel it.” Jim’s hand was on his erection, squeezing with a loose, inexpert grip. He tried leaning close to Spock’s ear. “Know you want it, come on.”

With a snarl, Spock pitched Jim to the ground. He realized abruptly that he was on his feet looking down at the transformed body and anguished eyes of his bondmate. Remorse bloomed hot and bitter at the base of his spine before he could exert control over it, and he kneeled to reach Jim, sprawled and shaking on the floor. Jim scrambled to get to his feet, skin ablaze in the human physiological reaction to humiliation, and he shoved Spock’s hands away. “Jim, allow me to –”

“Fuck you, Spock! Jesus, fuck, stop looking at me, stop looking at me! Don’t you _look_ at me, you fuck!” A fist collided with Spock’s ear, and then Jim was gone, darting through the shared bathroom into the captain’s quarters.

Spock stood naked in the barren bedroom of the first officer’s quarters for a moment and felt quite keenly the absence of Jim as he knew him: four inches taller and sixty pounds heavier, reconciled with the darkness inside himself instead of drowning in it, stubble on his jaw when he kissed him with so much tenderness. He had tamped down on the sensation of desolate solitude earlier as he sat in the captain’s chair on the bridge, when he answered Jim’s familiar chess moves, when he’d dipped the bed with his lone weight in this stark room when he required rest and could not bear to test his own hypothesis regarding Jim’s dilemma. He had pushed it down deep with the ease of a half Vulcan outcast terribly accustomed to loneliness, but now he allowed himself a single moment of illogic to miss his captain, his lover, his bondmate, before donning a robe and following the boy his bondmate had become into the captain’s quarters.

He found Jim crouched next to the bed shivering, a sheet wrapped around him despite the temperature controls still being set to the compromise between Vulcan-normal and Earth-normal.

“Go away,” Jim muttered into his arms, head tucked low.

“I apologize for …shoving you, Jim. I did not intend to cause you harm,” Spock said, seating himself cross-legged in front of Jim, who still did not look up.

“Please leave,” came the reply.

“I must explain myself. If, after you have listened to me, you would still prefer that I leave, I will of course vacate your quarters.”

Jim was silent, his harsh breath echoing off the bulkheads.

“I confess that you were correct in my assumption that I desire you.” Here Jim lifted his head slightly and cracked one eye to peer at him. “I find you a compelling, dynamic individual regardless of your incarnation. There is even reason to believe that…intimate contact between us could possibly return you to your proper state –” Both eyes now peeked from above arms crossed over knees. “ –but I am unable to justify perpetrating an act of molestation against you, despite the logic which dictates that I must.”

“How is it molestation if I _sit_ on your _penis_ begging for it?” Jim mumbled into his arms, eyes scowling and face flushing.

“You are below the age of consent.”

“You’re my _husband_.”

“Do you believe that my status as your spouse implies that I have open rights to your body at any time, regardless of your mental state or desires?”

“Yeah. Well, I mean, no, but –”

“It is my duty as your bondmate to keep you from harm, Jim. Even from yourself, or myself.”

“I just, I just want to keep you,” Jim said it a rush. “I just want you, Spock, what’s wrong with that?”

“Jim, you desire not only sexual gratification from me, but castigation for imagined transgressions in the form of rough, demeaning intercourse. I will not become party to injuries both emotional and physical to your person.”

Jim’s head shot up. “What? How did you --- What the hell are you – I never ---”

“Jim,” Spock said, laying light fingertips on Jim’s sheet-covered knee and ducking down to meet Jim’s eyes. “I know you. I know all of you.”

Jim’s face transformed into a caricature of itself, contorting in horror and panic. He began to hyperventilate, bunching the sheet in his fists as he shook his head side to side. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no –”

“Jim, listen to me. Inhale slowly through your nose, exhale slowly through your mouth. Be still. Be still, ashayam.” Spock had come around and lain a hot hand on Jim’s back through the sheet, maintaining an eighteen-centimeter distance between their bodies. Jim moaned through the restoration of his own very human controls, and then he was silent with his head in his arms and his breathing steady.

They remained huddled between the bed and the bulkheads for nineteen minutes and forty-three seconds. At last Jim shifted to look at Spock and said, “Stay with me? Don’t leave. Don’t leave.”

Spock inclined his head in acquiescence. Jim rose and clambered without pretense of grace into the bed, still wrapped in the sheet. Spock slid in behind him, their bodies molding together chest to back, hips cradled in hips, knees into knees. After arranging the covers, Spock slung an arm around the diminished body of his bondmate, who closed his eyes and slept without dreaming.

*

When Jim woke, Spock was propped against the bulkhead beside him, robe lashed to his body preserving all modesty, padd and stylus in hand. Jim recalled the events of the night before with sudden clarity and groaned, setting a hand to his eyes as if to block out his mortification. But Spock was still there, reading reports and writing up memos in bed, as if Jim really were his husband, nothing left to hide between them. Spock had implied that he was aware of all of Jim’s most jealously kept secrets, his burning shame and the leprous stains devouring his spirit. All this, and still Spock had stated outright that he wanted Jim. Something nagged at the edges of Jim’s memory, tantalizing him with its significance. Then, like the sun emerging from behind clouds to illuminate the sleep-dazed corners of his mind, he knew.

“Did you say we had to have sex to get me back to normal?” he blurted. He seemed to have startled Spock, who whipped his head to one side to look at him. He still lay prone, swaddled in the sheet, just the top half of his head exposed.

“That is my hypothesis, yes,” Spock answered with some reluctance.

“How’s that work, then? You got magic Vulcan sperm or something? Come one, come all, heal all your ills?”

Spock set his padd flat in his lap and regarded him with what Jim detected as fond vexation.

“No, Jim. Vulcan ejaculate is analogous to human ejaculate and has no supernatural properties, as I am sure you are aware.”

“Then what’s the deal?”

Spock inched his backside backward to sit up straighter against the bulkhead, hands pressed into the bed.

“It is not logical, per se,” he equivocated.

“Bring on the illogic then,” Jim pressed him. “I’d love to hear this.” He saw Spock take a moment to formulate his reply.

“I believe the catalyst for the transformative events of two nights ago was your expression of a wish to …give your virginity to me, though it was impossible. It was not, I believe, a romanticized notion of giving yourself to me born of antiquated Terran ideals conflating worth with sexual purity, rather, it was a gesture of entrusting me with your security. Your early sexual encounters were not…pleasant, Jim.”

Jim watched Spock fold his long-fingered hands over the pad in his lap. Spock did not shy from his gaze, though Jim felt himself shrinking inwardly at the thought of the things he must have done with Hank, the Coach, Mark, innumerable other rough and tumble men. The things he’d must have allowed them to do. Begged them to do. He shut his eyes against Spock’s easy acceptance of him, against the promise and weight of Spock’s unconditional devotion, tucking his nose into the sheet to burrow deeper.

“I still don’t get how it would fix me,” he whispered.

“It was my impression that wishes upon stars required no scientific explanation.”

Jim barked out a humorless guffaw, still not opening his eyes. “Funny, from you.”

“Indeed, that is essentially what the doctor implied as well.” There was a pause. “He also implied that I would – what is the phrase? ‘Grasp at hay’ to find a resolution.”

Jim felt a heaviness settle over him. It was the first time he’d truly considered Spock’s perspective: he’d lost a captain and a partner, and despite his impassive demeanor, he missed the man whose place Jim had taken. He would go to any lengths to get that man back, even eschewing logic when logic provided no viable answers. He dislodged his head from his cocoon and looked at Spock, heart aching. He realized that Spock’s fealty was not his to snatch up and hoard like so much non-perishable food. Spock was for his future.

“I hypothesize,” Spock continued, “that if we engage in sexual relations as per the terms of your wish, thereby fulfilling it, the regression process would reverse itself and you would once again be an adult and the captain of this starship.”

“And your husband.”

“And my husband.”

Jim wriggled, encased yet in the sheet, toward Spock until he lay against Spock’s side. Spock poured out heat like a star going supernova. After a moment, one of those fevered arms settled over Jim, soothing, not restraining.

“So we have to. Even if you don’t want to, you know, take advantage. I promise not to ask for anything bad.” He craned a bit to get a look at Spock’s face. Jim thought he could see skepticism there before he settled back with his face mashed against Spock’s hip.

“We will not reach Zenzobar of the Third Outer Ring for approximately two days. I believe it would be beneficial for us to spend time in each other’s presence and communicate frequently so as to avoid more… misunderstandings.”

“So you wanna hang out and talk?”

“Essentially, yes. If the efforts of the science and medical teams in regards to your case prove futile, and we must …copulate, I will strive for a wholly positive experience. Providing such will require trust and mutual understanding, which we do not yet have between us.”

 _Translation_ , Jim thought: _you don’t want some damaged kid throwing himself at you and then freaking out again._ Out loud, he said, “Heh, I think you just promised me the lay of my life, Spock.”

Warm fingers threaded gently into his hair. Jim’s heart skipped a beat at the contact.

“So it seems, Jim.”

*

“Drink up,” McCoy grunted as he set a tall glass of milk in front of Jim in the mess before alpha shift. His tray clattered as he slid in next to Spock, staring at Jim and his glass of milk with an expectant expression. “Well?”

“I don’t like milk too much.”

“That’s not just any milk, Jimboy. That milk’s gonna turn you into a man.” McCoy leaned back, crossing his arms and giving Spock a smug smirk.

Jim frowned.

“But I thought –”

“Christ, did this hobgoblin tell you he needed to deflower you?”

“Doctor, I am reasonably certain—”

“Betcha just ate that right up, too, huh Jim?”

“Hey! Shut up!” Jim stood, scowling at McCoy, a hot blush crawling up his neck, tinting his ears, flooding his face. The mess hall went quiet and McCoy looked contrite.

“Sorry, Jim. Just forgetting you’re not – you, sometimes.”

Jim sank back into his seat, burning with embarrassment. Spock leveled a derisive eyebrow at McCoy, setting down his utensils.

“Doctor, I assume you have data to support your milk hypothesis. Please elaborate.”

Looking rather pinched, McCoy pushed his tray to the side and leaned forward.

“Me and Christine’ve been reading up on those Devarsian goat myths, and in every single one, youths and maidens and old men are healed by the power of goats’ milk. And Spock, remember how I about died when I saw some for sale at that farmers’ market? This is my last container of it, still good and everything.”

“That is illogical. There is no evidence that what has befallen Jim originated from Devar XI. Our presence on the planet was minimal and occurred over four weeks prior to Jim’s regression.”

“And what makes this less logical than your gonzo ‘wish upon a star’ statutory rape theory?” McCoy barked, eyebrows arching wildly, a finger thrust into Spock’s personal space. “I thought as long as we were trying out flights of fancy on this tin can that drinking a tall glass of alien goats’ milk was as likely to cure him as drinking a tall glass of fully grown Vulcan male!”

“Doctor, the expression of the wish and the timing of the regression suggest that—”

“Know what Spock? I think you _want_ it to be some kinda crazy wish Jim made in bed with you. This is _your_ fantasy come true, you’d _love_ to fix up your broken boy with the power of your big, Vulcan---”

“Ears!” Jim hollered, getting to his feet again. The mess hall was vacant now, the exodus unnoticed amid the fracas of such lively discussion. McCoy’s jaws snapped shut as Jim chugged the Devarsian goats’ milk and flung the glass behind his shoulder, careless of the shattering. Then he threw his arms out and snarled, “Well? Come on, McCoy, where’s my big boy body now? Huh?”

He stood panting in the empty mess, McCoy gawping at him, Spock’s fixed gaze as intense as ever.

“Jesus,” McCoy breathed. “Jesus, I’m sorry, Jim. I swear I’m not trying to be a jackass about this, I just. I want you to be well, and whole, and innocent, I guess.”

Jim snorted, lips twisting in a sneer. “You’re a long time too late for that shit, doctor.”

“Aw, Jim, it’s not like that.”  
“Yeah? What the hell’s it like then?”

“It’s like all this shit that happened to you is just that: shit that happened to you, outta your control, and you did your best under the circumstances. It doesn’t make you bad, Jim. I wish you could see that.”

“You have no idea about anything, and you’re trying to keep the only one who does away from me. Why are you doing this? Why are you punishing me?”

McCoy rounded the table and grabbed Jim by the shoulders in a harsh grip. “No, Jim. No.” He shook him. Spock was on his feet in an instant, prying McCoy off of Jim.

“Doctor, unhand him. I apologize, Jim. The doctor is incapable of restraining himself. He is often guilty of letting his emotions rule him.”

“Don’t you even start, Spock, I swear to God.” McCoy backed off. “A body might think you were on the verge of an emotion. I’m sorry again, Jim. You need to know I never meant you harm.”

Jim wrapped his arms around himself in a defensive position, hunching his shoulders. McCoy shot him a penitent look.

“I gotta get to sickbay. You just… well. You just hang in there.”

When McCoy was gone, Jim sat again, bowing his head over his breakfast. He forked some of the pancakes and rubbery, reconstituted sausage into his mouth, chewing slowly. Spock remained upright and rigid, staring at Jim’s back, appetite gone.

“He’s gone, you know. You can sit down.”

“I am aware, Jim.”

“Then come here and sit down and stop staring at me.”

Spock sat, but kept his eyes on Jim’s downturned face.

“You feel shame though it was McCoy who disgraced himself, not you.”

“No one said humans are logical, Spock.” The pancakes and sausage were steadily disappearing. Relaxing his spine almost imperceptibly, Spock picked up his spoon to stir his porridge.

“Dr. McCoy has a forceful personality, but he is your closest friend, Jim. You knew and held him in high esteem long before we met. He was truthful when he stated that he meant you no harm. He and I share a contentious relationship, but after a fashion, we are also friends.”

“I can’t see how.”

“You must trust the man you became.”

When Jim’s plate was clean, Spock stood.

“Perhaps you would derive pleasure from visiting the bridge today, Jim. You are technically still Starfleet personnel.”

Jim brightened, slung the trays into the receptacles, and matched Spock stride for stride on the way to the bridge.

*

  
When the doors to the bridge opened, Spock glided in with purpose, but Jim hung back in the doorway, awestruck. Every surface shone as if waxed daily, every piece of equipment was sleeker, smaller, and probably faster than he’d ever seen, not to mention that technology he’d never even bothered imagining, and the viewscreen… The viewscreen comprised the entirety of the far wall, stars and planets and assorted masses studded in the blanket of space, the _Enterprise’s_ protective shroud. Jim realized he was gaping when he saw a pretty communications officer looking and him and suppressing a smile without success as if familiar with his brand of enthusiasm. He shot her back a shrug and a sheepish smile, fully entering the bridge.

With an upturned palm and sparing gestures, Spock began indicating the bridge crew and introducing them. “Helmsman and chief navigator, Lieutenant Sulu and Ensign Chekov. Chief communications officer Lieutenant Uhura. Systems analyst Lieutenant Xingtao, tactical officer Lieutenant Commander Ahrens.”

Jim nodded at each of them, feeling small in the face of their smiles and shared looks and warm welcomes. He swallowed, suddenly dizzy.

“You may sit at the science station, Mr. Kirk,” Spock told him, directing him to a data console next to the chief communications officer as he sat in the command chair. Jim turned his attention to the science station, taking measured breaths and ignoring the cold lick of discontent at Spock’s brusque professional manner. _Nothing personal,_ he reminded himself as Spock and the navigator discussed route mapping, Spock’s eyes never alighting on Jim. Jim straightened his spine and tried to act like an officer who deserved to be on this magnificent bridge. Scrolling through the data, Jim skimmed a lot of dry analyses of the compositions of nearby gaseous bodies and their positions in space until, not three minutes after he had sat down, he was sure he was done with the science station.

“How you doing?” came a low query from the chief communications officer. Uhuru? He turned to face her.

“Okay,” he said. She cocked her head.

“You don’t sound so sure.”

He shrugged, looking back down into the data console. “I’m just causing problems for people. It would be better if I changed back.”

“They’re working on it in the science labs,” she said. Then she gave a soft laugh. “Not sure what medical’s doing, though.”

“You heard about that?”

“Honey, everybody heard about that. How’s the goats’ milk settling in?”

Jim couldn’t help breaking into a smile. “Kinda sloshy,” he whispered.

“You’ll be okay, Jim. And if we have to send you into negotiations as is, I’ll make sure you’re totally prepped.”

“What’s with that anyway? I mean, why can’t that princess deal with someone else? Spock’s gotta be a way better choice than me right now. Or, you know, anyone.”

Uhura barked out a short laugh, then looked around to make sure no one heard her. She leaned back in when no one gave her the stink eye and said, “Your totally fabricated reputation precedes you, Kirk.”

Jim’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“The outer ringers’ only desirable resources are precious gems and dilithium. They’ve had to scrap for pretty much everything else, and part of that means building themselves up, dressing themselves up. If you’re rich, you drip with jewels, you can afford the right clothes, the right lifestyle, the right social circle, whatever. What is beautiful is what is valuable, and that includes life forms. Some of them, like Supreme Empress H’Lopia, throw their power around and demand to deal only with beings of, quote, ‘exceptional physical beauty.’ And by deal with, I mean sleep with. She heard wildly exaggerated stories about you all across Federation space and decided you were her next target.”

Jim stared. “Huh. I didn’t know news of my total hotness had reached all over the galaxy like that.”

Uhura laughed again, adjusting her personal comm device. “Well,” she said in a teasing tone, “there’s no accounting for taste.”

“She just hasn’t seen the rest of you yet. She’ll be throwing me over for that super buff helmsman as soon as we reach orbit.” Jim thrust a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the helm.

“We’ll see. She’s pretty insistent, and, ah, _shrill_ , and I hear Komack owes her a favor for the crazy rock he’s got on his wife’s hand right now.”

“Starfleet Command can force me to sleep with someone even though I’m Vulcan married?”

“Well, no, but you always manage to let ’em down easy. I don’t know how you do it, Kirk, but I’ve seen you turn the most aggressive suitors into harmless kittens who _thank you_ when all’s said and done and they haven’t gotten you in the sack. Sometimes I still can’t believe it when it happens.”

Jim glanced at Spock in the periphery of his vision. “Obviously I’m just that smooth, Lieutenant.” Uhura laughed again, swinging her seat back to face her console.

Alpha shift passed slowly, peppered with conversation with Uhura. At lunch, alternates relieved the bridge crew so they could eat in the mess. He was spared McCoy’s fussing, but not Chekov and Sulu’s bickering. Spock and Uhura shared a quiet discussion about the fascinating language of Samargol V’s native fleabats, and Jim sat silently spooning soggy replicated pasta into his mouth until it was time to go back to the bridge and the hard ergonomic seat at the science station.

After interminable stretches of time during which Jim counted his arm hairs, mooned over Spock, tried to eavesdrop on Sulu and Chekov’s conversation and let himself be mesmerized by Uhura’s sparkling earrings, something worthwhile finally happened. Lieutenant Sulu steered them through an unanticipated asteroid belt with the ease and agility of a bird soaring free on the wind. Jim leaned back in the seat, captivated by the images on the expansive viewscreen, the starship tilting into curves, sailing over and under and around the debris with staggering grace. The bridge crew had ceased all conversation, all extraneous noise-making, to allow Sulu full concentration on his task. When they reached the end of the string of space debris, Jim couldn’t help letting out an exhilarated whoop and clapping his hands together once. Sulu took a deep breath and let his shoulders slump a little in relief. Chekov chattered at him and patted his shoulder, grinning. The bridge hummed with the crew’s collective satisfaction.

The jovial mood was short lived, broken when Spock sprang to his feet and moved toward the viewscreen.

“Magnify unidentified object,” he said. There, a speck on the edge of the viewscreen expanded, and the crew beheld a clunky, outdated vessel drifting without power. “Hail at all frequencies, Lieutenant Uhura.”

“Nothing, Captain. Communications are completely down. They’re broadcasting a general distress signal, but no recorded SOS and no answers to our hails.”

“Sir, life support systems reporting significant damage, defaulted to minimum use mode,” Xingtao said. “It looks like a private science vessel, Earth-manufacture. I’m unable to determine what happened to it without more data.”

“Mr. Ahrens, report to security and ready an away team with environmental suits.”

Ahrens stood at attention. “Sir, will you be beaming over with us?”

Spock’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly toward Jim. “Negative, Tactical Officer. In addition to security personnel, bring Lieutenant Murphy-Stone from sciences and have her fitted with a camera for a vid-feed to be broadcasted directly to the bridge viewscreen. Dismissed.”

Spock was at the science station in two long steps, clasping his hands together behind his back.

“It would be best if you returned to your quarters or visited the observation deck, Mr. Kirk.”

“I’d rather stay. I mean, I’ll be thinking about what could be happening no matter where I am on the ship, anyway.”

“Certain things cannot be unseen, Mr. Kirk.”

Jim clenched his jaw and glowered at Spock. “And I think I know that better than anyone, _Mr. Spock_.” He saw resignation pass over Spock’s eyes, the moment Spock gave in, but Jim saw no fondness qualify the concession and so felt no satisfaction, only resentment at being made to feel like a child and a burden. He dug his heels into the floor on either side of his seat at the science station, crossing his arms over his body, tucking his fists into his armpits.

“Very well, Mr. Kirk. You will remain silent and stationary for the duration.” Spock went back to the command chair without sparing Jim another glance, and Jim swallowed back a hot rage bubbling up in his throat. Uhura leaned over and touched his arm, sympathy coloring her expression. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see her seeing him.

Tense minutes passed until the viewscreen flickered and flared into an image of the landing party’s position on the unidentified vessel. They had beamed into the corresponding transporter room, a gray, empty place with dim lighting.

“Can you hear me, Captain Spock? Come in, Captain Spock,” came a female voice through the bridge-wide comm speakers. On the viewscreen, crew members flanked her and fanned out as they stepped into the corridor. The viewscreen went black, and the bridge heard only breathing and shuffling. One by one the landing party turned on their flashlights.

“Affirmative, Lieutenant. Have you scanned for life signs?”

“Yes, sir. Nothing alive within range. Oxygen levels low, but able to support life. I’m trying to get a read on why this ship is dead in space, but so far there’s no relevant data.”

The landing party moved through the corridors, shining their lights through open doors, exposing vacant, stagnating rooms. Sometimes, spatters of blood, much of it brown with age, appeared on walls where the light fell on them.

“Lieutenant Murphy-Stone, have you encountered any casualties?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Exercise caution, Lieutenant. Attempt to reach the bridge.”

“Yes, sir.”

The security personnel moved quickly and silently, flashlights scanning the premises, phasers set to stun. Murphy-Stone brought up the rear, the buzzing of the tricorder and the rubbing of the environmental suit against itself as she walked the only sounds on the bridge of the _Enterprise_. The barren starship’s lights sputtered now and again, exposing in flashes a sturdy, utilitarian vessel with equipment destroyed and strewn along its floors, all of it smeared with iron-based blood. And there were the bones.

“Oh hell,” Murphy-Stone whispered, the sensitive microphone of the camera picking it up and delivering the soft curse onto the bridge of the _Enterprise_. When the away team came across bones picked clean, they averted their lights. They made their way to the bridge, stepping over broken, blood-stained bulkheads, tendon-lashed human bones and crushed science gear, pointing phasers round every corner.

As the away team approached the bridge, a sense of foreboding flooded Jim’s core. Dread began to flatten his lungs and he gripped the seat of his chair in an effort to steady himself. He felt sweat prickle along his hairline and down his back. On the viewscreen, Murphy-Stone and Ahrens stood back as the three men from security forced the bridge door’s wide and filed in. No bloody tableau confronted them, no sickening horrors awaited them there. Jim let out a shaking breath.

“There’s a text document on screen at the helm, sir,” Murphy-Stone reported. “It looks like… it looks like an account of what happened here.”

“The main points, Lieutenant.”

“There was a calculation error, or maybe intentional sabotage. They ran out of fuel and their warp drives powered down, as well as their sublight engines. They went as far as they could on fumes under impulse power, not even a parsec. An unknown computer virus jammed all communications, destroyed 70% of the life support generators and forced the food replicators offline. There was… there was only a limited store of nonperishable food items.”

The roaring in Jim’s ears wasn’t interference from the comm devices, but the rush of his own frenzied blood, his jackrabbit heart railing against the cage of his ribs. That which he couldn’t unsee was upon him again. Paralyzed, Jim could not tear his gaze from the viewscreen, could not even think to regret defying Spock’s earlier suggestion to leave the bridge.

“The crew lasted four months and then….” Murphy-Stone seemed unwilling to say it.

“That’s enough, Lieutenant,” Spock said, sparing her the task. “Return to the transporter room and beam back immediately. We must warp out of this area of space as soon as your party returns to the _Enterprise_.”

The away team made haste away from the bridge, the camera mounted on Murphy-Stone’s shoulder jostling with her efforts. Suddenly, the image pitched and Murphy-Stone was on the ground, her flashlight skittering away from her, a shriek piercing the air.

“Lieutenant!” It was Ahrens, back in an instant, flashlight thwarting the camera. The _Enterprise_ bridge crew could only listen as a flurry of shouts and curses accompanied the thuds of bodies colliding with bulkheads, the floor, other bodies, and finally, finally, the dull blast of a phaser set to stun.

“Mr. Ahrens, report. Report, Mr. Ahrens,” Jim heard Spock demand distantly. The sound of harsh breathing filled the bridge. The camera had not restored visual. “Mr. Ahrens, that’s an order.”

“We’re fine, sir. Shaken, but all fine,” Murphy-Stone panted.

“Murphy-Stone is unharmed, Captain,” came Ahrens’ voice. “She was attacked by a survivor and there was a scuffle. I killed him. I killed him, sir. It was set to stun but I killed him.”

A wave of nausea sent Jim’s vision swimming. He lurched up and stumbled out of the bridge, heedless of Spock calling his name after him.

*

McCoy was lurking near the bridge bathroom, contemplating entering the bridge to try to apologize to Jim again, when a tornado of limbs slammed into him with the force of all Jim’s torment behind it. The pair of them toppled to the ground, McCoy’s head smacking against the floor tile. He groaned. Jim slid off him and lay facedown on the floor, no strength left in his quaking body, gagging through tearless, wracking sobs. McCoy propped himself up by his elbows, watching his captain, reduced in more ways than the obvious, break down under the enormous weight of his own guilt. McCoy shifted to a sitting position and carefully laid a hand between Jim’s prominent shoulder blades. Suddenly Jim reeled, eyes wide, and he scrambled toward a toilet where he heaved his lunch, his breakfast, and all his sour bile. Through it all McCoy rubbed warm circles on his back.

“Easy now. There you go, darlin’, let it out. There you go.” He murmured comforting nonsense now and then, his gruff voice reverberating between the bathroom bulkheads. Jim hugged the cool toilet in the aftermath, sweaty and quivering and unable to summon the strength to move or tell McCoy to fuck off. McCoy pressed the flusher for him.

“It’s all right now, Jim. You’re all right now.”

“Never be all right.

“Yeah? Well there’s a starship you captain says otherwise. They don’t just give starships to anyone off the street, you know.”

“They ate each other on that other one.”

“What?”

“There was a ship, and a distress signal. He sent a rescue party with no one to rescue; they all ate each other. And then they killed him.”

McCoy was silent, piecing together a story to go with Jim’s disjointed narrative. It was a familiar story, dressed up nice and new with different players and costumes, but it was still the same old horror show. McCoy didn’t need to hear the gritty details to know them and ache in response.

“I know, Jim. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know. You don’t know.”

“Tell me, darlin’. Tell me how it is.”

Jim pulled away from the toilet and McCoy’s soothing hand on his back to glare at McCoy with accusing blue eyes.

“It’s like there was no food left and they kept waiting for someone to come save them and no one came, no matter how many waves they sent, or how many people died and then some of them got so hungry they turned on you like dogs. They turned on you when the food was gone and the police patrolled for race betrayers and all you could do was hide and try to keep the little ones alive and still they’d find you, they’d find you, understand?” Jim rubbed his face with his hands, pressing his fingers to his eyes as if to block out what he’d been living with for so long.

“No,” McCoy said. Jim looked at him. “No, I’ll never understand. No one can, not without living through it. But you did Jim. You lived through it and you’re here and you’re strong and you’re breakin’ hearts all over the galaxy.” Jim was shaking his head, not hearing McCoy’s attempt to lighten the mood, maybe not hearing McCoy at all.

“You don’t know what I did. You don’t know what I did.”

“All right. How ’bout I tell you what _I_ did, then?”

“You’re a doctor. You save people, boo hoo.”

McCoy snorted. “You think you got the market cornered on pain and guilt and bad deeds done, boy? Are you so far gone that you think you’re the only one who feels as deep as you do?” Jim’s eyes were two blazing points in that thundercloud face.

McCoy sighed and stretched his legs out in front of him, back against a bulkhead. He wished, not for the first time, that Starfleet uniforms weren’t so closely tailored to the body so he had room for a discreet flask. That lack, more than anything, proved that stars didn’t just bestow wishes on the needy. He was needy, goddamnit, and he still had to hide his liquor away in his desk’s false bottom.

“You ever heard of pyrrhoneuritis? Well, it’s a wasting disease. Disgusting thing, eats away at you, breaks you down, leaves you in agony. There was no cure. My dad got it, and there was nothing I could do. Sat by his bed listening to him moaning while I pored over the medical texts again and again. Thought I could buy time injecting him with painkillers and tri-ox compound and total bullshit that never did a goddamned thing. He eventually used all the breath he had left to beg me to let him die. Not just let him die, but make it happen. My father lay there in his bed asking me to kill him, Jim.”

Jim mouth hung open, his face bloodless, attention rapt. McCoy forced himself to go on.

“So what could I do? What could I do Jim? A few weeks later, a goddamn handful of days, really, someone on the Trebalum colonies found a cure. For pyrrhoneuritis! Hundreds of years of fatal affliction and bam! They cleared that shit right up just weeks too late to save my dad. I went over and over it: if I’d just waited, if I’d found it faster myself. I sent myself straight into hell, couldn’t think of anything but his wasted body disintegrating while I watched. I destroyed my marriage, I lost my little girl. I killed my father Jim. I killed him.”

“I killed him,” Jim echoed in a hollow voice.

McCoy nodded.

“I killed him,” Jim said again. “He found us and grabbed Kevin but I was quicker. I was quicker.”

“And you saved Kevin, and yourself, and all those other kids, kept them safe until the shuttles came. You know what he would have done if you hadn’t killed him, Jim. It’s no shame. You’ve got to stop torturing yourself.”

“Have you?”

McCoy’s answering smile was wry. “Touché.”

“Maybe…” Jim hesitated. “Maybe people like you and me, no matter what our reasons were to do it, maybe we don’t get to be happy. You know?”

McCoy swore he felt his hair going gray. “Aw, hell, kid. You are happy. On this boat, with that pointy-eared bastard, doing what you were born to do. And you deserve that happiness. You know that, don’t you?”

Jim looked bleak. “I don’t see how. I don’t see how anyone can stand to look at me.”

Without thought McCoy leaned over and gathered Jim to his chest in a crushing embrace. He heard Jim’s bones rub together, and Jim let out a strained gurgle before McCoy abruptly freed him, awkwardness pervading the moment.

“Oh,” Jim said.

“Sorry,” McCoy muttered. “Just— just don’t talk like that, would you?”

Spock arrived with his characteristic silence, hovering in the entryway with badly concealed concern. Jim looked up at him with naked hope on his face, but then he seemed to wilt and looked back at the ground. The heavy ball of conflict McCoy had been dragging around about where his diaphragm usually was for the past two days felt lighter as he watched Spock and Jim each trying to hide what they meant to each other, both failing rather spectacularly. This is how it had been for them, in the beginning, while everyone around them waited, biting their nails in anticipation of the inevitable. Over the course of the mission, McCoy had watched these two men become the best possible versions of themselves as they strove to be worthy of each other, whole and healed. Jim was still a hopeless flirt occasionally crippled by self-doubt, but he had found an abiding peace at Spock’s side, in his role as captain, by his own measure of judgment. And where once he was a raw, unVulcan nerve of barely contained anger and vulnerability, Spock was calmer and more self-possessed too, eternally working to reconcile emotion with logic, human with Vulcan, passion with temperance. Not that he wasn’t still an uptight, condescending bastard who claimed to have no feelings most of the time, but McCoy could admit, in the private recesses of his mind, that Spock was not just tolerable but admirable. He was tilting at windmills keeping them apart, and he knew with the steadfast certainty of a zealot that Spock would never hurt Jim, would lay down his life before letting Jim come to harm. He had done so countless times in the line of duty, as Jim had for him, the pair of them causing their kindly family doctor to develop ulcers and high blood pressure he was unable hide from Chapel’s eagle eyes. McCoy, with great effort and a deep breath, took his own advice and let it go.

Standing up, he met Spock’s eyes. McCoy marveled at the thought that he’d once found them inscrutable and impossibly alien. “You taking care of this ship, Acting Captain?”

“I endeavor to perform to the highest standards of duty and keep her in good repair until such time as her rightful captain is restored, doctor.”

“Glad to hear it, Spock. Glad to hear it.”

At the edges of McCoy’s line of vision, he saw Spock kneel down in front of Jim before he took the scenic route back to sickbay.

*

In the early hours of ship’s morning, some time before the start of alpha shift, Jim woke sweating, pinned by a heavy arm. Trying not to dislodge said arm, he dragged the blanket and sheets off of himself, sighing in relief when the body heat generated beneath them dissipated. Despite Jim’s efforts, the action roused Spock, who remained immobile with his head mashed against Jim’s shoulder for a moment before he sat up with a precipitous jerk.

“I have overslept,” he said, the slightest hint of horror coloring his voice. His immaculate hair was awry, much of it perpendicular to his head, the straight bangs listing upwards and to one side. Jim thought his heart might burst at the sight.

“What? Alpha shift doesn’t even start for like an hour.”

“I am accustomed to waking early to complete ship’s business and maximize productivity,” Spock said, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, robe slipping off his shoulder to reveal a tantalizing swath of pale, unblemished skin.

“Spock, wait.” Jim shot out a hand, grabbing Spock by the wrist. “Please, just, wait.”

Spock turned his head to look at Jim over his shoulder, pulling the robe in to cover himself. “Are you still unwell, Jim?”

“No. I just— like you here, with me. So stay?” He tugged a little on Spock’s arm. Spock paused before complying.

“A few more minutes only, Jim,” he warned, opening his arms so Jim could burrow into his robe-clad chest like he had the night before.

Jim hid his grin in the silken black fabric, inhaling deeply of Spock’s particular warm scent. It made his whole body tingle.

“Maybe you were just really tired last night,” Jim offered. For him, at least, the events of the day had wrung him dry and left him exanimate. He’d crawled into bed after a forcible dinner, thankfully taken in the captain’s quarters rather than in the mess, and pleaded with Spock not to go back to his own empty rooms next door.

“Vulcans require less sleep than humans.”

“I’m noting that that statement neither confirms nor denies whether or not you were really tired and needed more rest than usual.”

“You have discovered me. I shall have to find new tricks.”

Laughing, Jim pushed himself upright to look Spock in the face. His amusement faded at the open reverence and the olive blush he found there. Slowly he brought his hands up to cup Spock’s head, and Spock’s eyes fluttered shut. Jim leaned in, careful of his morning breath, and set a feathery kiss on Spock’s parted lips. Emboldened by the quickening of Spock’s breath, Jim pressed a fuller kiss into his mouth, the tip of his tongue flickering to taste the sweetly curved lower lip. Stroking Spock’s high cheekbones with the pads of his thumbs, Jim tilted his head to the side and held Spock to himself as he trailed his tongue just inside Spock’s mouth, sucking lightly on his lip. A rumble erupted from Spock’s chest, and he pulled Jim forward, wrapping his arms around his back, further deepening the kiss. Jim moaned at the increased contact and the searing tongue in his mouth, slinging a leg over Spock’s hips and rocking forward.

Spock parted from him, a took his hands from his face, holding them slack.

“We cannot do this now, Jim.”

“But we have to, right? So why not now?” Jim punctuated his question with a shallow thrust of his erection into Spock’s thigh.

Spock smoothed Jim’s own sleep-tousled hair down, hands coming round to cradle the back of his head. He rested his forehead on Jim’s.

“There is not sufficient time. I must perform my daily ablutions and ingest sustenance before reporting to the bridge in forty-three minutes.”

“You’re going _early_? Come on!”

“I have much to attend to today, particularly if I intend to resolve our dilemma most thoroughly in my off-duty hours.”

Jim perked up, wrapping his arms around Spock’s neck and his legs around Spock’s hips to give him a full-body hug. He caught the tip of an ear and kissed it. This further enflamed him and he gave into the urge to rut his engorged cock against Spock’s stomach.

Spock easily disentangled himself, placed Jim on the edge of the bed and stood up. Jim pouted up at him, throat issuing inarticulate sounds of disbelief, his penis a swollen column straining forward, thwarted by the cotton of his Starfleet-issue briefs.

“You will not distract me, Mr. Kirk,” Spock admonished him. “However, I would be cruel to leave you in such a state, and cruelty is abhorrent to me. Vulcans are pacifists.”

He kneeled before Jim, hot hands parting his knees. Jim’s breathing hitched as Spock eased the waistband of his underwear down, encouraging him to lift up at the hips so he could discard them altogether. Spock set his nose into the thicket of bronze curls at Jim’s groin, filling his lungs with Jim’s intimate scent and sighing. He curled a tight fist around Jim’s cock and pumped it, passing his palm over the sensitive head just as he set the flat of his tongue against the base and licked a long, hot stripe upward. Jim couldn’t hold back a high-pitched yowl. Spock sealed his sweltering mouth over the head, applying devastating suction even as he slid the entire length of Jim’s cock into the wet cavern of his mouth, up and down in an unfaltering, punishing rhythm supplemented by a hand at the base and a hand cupping his balls. The visual confirmation of Spock devouring his dick intoxicated him, and he forced his eyes to stay open.

Spock was moaning continually around his cock, a blush high on his cheekbones, cocoa eyes half lidded with arousal and sending sparks up Jim’s spine when he met them with his own. Jim too was making undignified noises, bellowing curses and benedictions in equal measure into the silent captain’s quarters, in full view of everlasting space and innumerable stars. Jim fought the urge to throw his head back, close his eyes and thrust forward with abandon, not wanting to miss a moment of Spock’s expert fellatio. _I need to remember exactly this_ , he told himself, twisting a hand into Spock’s disheveled black hair and using the other to keep himself upright as he screamed his release, flooding Spock’s mouth with spurts of thick semen. What Spock could not swallow dribbled past his lips, but he stayed where he was, mouth stuffed with cock, easing Jim through the twitchy aftershocks, milking the last of the ejaculate from Jim’s spent loins into his own welcoming throat. Jim allowed himself to collapse on the bed panting as Spock extracted himself, cleaning Jim up with gentle swipes of his tongue. When he was finished, he pressed wet kisses to Jim’s concave stomach, Jim’s hands coming up to toy with his hair.

“Tell me you’re not going to the bridge right now,” Jim implored him. “At least let me suck you off too.”

Spock stood, looming over him, amusement lighting his eyes, enormous erection bobbing unabashedly for attention through his open robe. Jim eyed it hungrily.

“As I stated earlier, there is insufficient time. We will have ample opportunity when I am off-duty, Jim. As I endeavor to be on the bridge in thirty-nine minutes, I must now make haste.” Spock stooped to kiss him, and Jim tasted his own sperm in Spock’s mouth, a sharp, organic flavor. The thought of his come rocketing down Spock’s throat sent another bolt of arousal racing through his cock, into his ass and up his spine, lighting his nipples and the back of his neck. He moaned when Spock pulled away. “Patience is a virtue, Jim.” With that, Spock disappeared into the bathroom between their quarters.

With a frustrated groan, Jim buried his head under a pillow and began to count the minutes to 1600 hours.

*

“They must have their own lube, Doctor,” Chapel commented with an innocent arch of her brow as McCoy placed a new bottle of lubricant into the small medical bag he was preparing for Jim. So far it contained an enema kit, disposable hypoallergenic washcloths, a hypo with a muscle relaxant, a hypo with a painkiller, medicated ointment, and several old-fashioned latex condoms just to make McCoy feel better about the whole thing. So maybe he went a little overboard. He felt ridiculous, like a Victorian mother preparing her daughter for her wedding night with euphemisms and speeches about duty. Only much more practical. In space. Starring an unsmiling half-Vulcan with prehensile eyebrows as the dashing suitor.

“Might as well be really prepared,” he said. “This one has a numbing agent.”

“Not to dwell on the scary visual or anything, but I’m sure Spock knows what he’s doing.”

“Well Jim doesn’t. I can’t trust him not to do something monumentally bone-headed during this whole… ordeal.”

“He’s more together than you give him credit for. This one _and_ the standard issue.”

“Ha! Where have you been the last four years while I’ve been sewing his body parts back on?”

“I’ve been here, Leonard. I’ve been right here.”

Silence and tension percolated through McCoy’s office. He suddenly couldn’t breathe.

“Well,” he said gruffly, dumbfounded and blinking at her. “Well.”

Chapel rolled her eyes and took the bag from in front of him, stepping just outside his office door. “And he’s always been fine. He’s made of tough stuff. So. I’ll take this to him and you can sit in here fretting about God knows what all by yourself.”

Chapel was out of sickbay and in the turbolift before McCoy sank back down and called himself a twice-damned, flea-bitten old fool of a country doctor.

*

Chapel had commed the captain’s quarters and checked the observation deck she’d shown him the other day before giving up and asking the computer for Jim’s location. She supposed it was unimaginative of her to think that he would be twiddling his thumbs all day in his quarters waiting for Spock to get off shift and ravish him. When the computer reported that he was in engineering, she felt as panicked as McCoy, horror spreading through her as she envisioned Jim causing all manner of mayhem on the deeper decks with Lieutenant Commander Scott and Lieutenant Keenser. She shook off the uncharitable thought and made her way down seventeen decks into the bowels of ship, where she always imagined Scott lived like some kind of genius recluse scribbling equations on the bulkheads, even though she knew his quarters were right next to McCoy’s. She seldom saw him anywhere near the officers’ quarters.

When she finally found Jim in what seemed like the farthest corner of the remotest engineering deck, he was not causing mayhem but shining a flashlight into a Jeffries tube from a ladder. Keenser’s legs dangled down from the top perch and Chapel could hear Mr. Scott barking orders at him from inside. Jim saw her approaching and shot a smile at her before tucking his lips between his teeth to suppress a wider grin. He flicked his eyes upward to indicate the squabbling engineers.

“I have a Ph. D in warp mechanics!”

“Och, aye, Dr. Keenser Butterfingers! How did you even manage this anyway; you’re made of rocks!”

“Maybe if the chief engineer didn’t spill marmite everywhere he goes, this wouldn’t have happened!”

“Don’t blame this on me, you wee cave gnome! I’ve seen your productivity logs!”

“Oh yeah? Who put the coolant in the plasma injectors last week because he sensed a bottle of Romulan ale being opened three decks down?”

“That has nothing to do with this!”

“You’re lucky I caught that before we all exploded!”

“Gentlemen!” Chapel interjected in a booming voice, leaning close to Jim to peer into the tube. Scott’s mouth hung open and Keenser’s obsidian seeing-orbs shifted side to side as the pair of them shut up and stared down at her.

“Nurse Chapel! What a lovely surprise, visiting us poor sods down here in engineering. To what do we owe this supreme pleasure?” Scott asked when he recovered.

“I’d like a moment with Jim, if you can spare him. Got a bit of medical business to discuss with him.”

Scott waved her off. “Of course, of course, it’s no bother. Hand us that torch before you go, would you, lad?”

Jim passed the flashlight off to Keenser and stepped off the ladder.

“See you guys later,” he called up. Keenser waved at him, and Scott nodded distractedly. Jim and Chapel were just out of earshot when the engineers resumed their verbal assault on one another.

”How’d you hook up with those two?” Chapel asked him as made their way out of the lower decks.

“They were in the mess at lunch and Scotty asked if I wanted to see a warp drive. Then we dismantled one of the broken impulse engines, then one of the ensigns reported the problem you saw us ‘fixing.’ What’s up with you?”

Chapel lifted up the medical bag. “Sex kit.”

Jim reddened and looked around to see if anyone had heard.

“Oh, calm down. Everyone does it, alone or with other beings, but no one wants to admit it.”

“No, it’s just… does everyone know what the cure is?”

“I think just me and McCoy. And Spock, obviously. And anyone who heard McCoy yesterday in the mess. And anyone they told.”

“So, everyone.”

“Looks like.”

The turbolift finally got to engineering and the doors parted before them. They entered and the turbolift lurched upward.

“Well, that’s awkward,” Jim said after a moment, still red-faced and unable to meet Chapel’s eyes.

“No, what’s awkward is I’m going to show you how to use this enema.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. _Show_ me?”

“Okay, tell you.”

“You know, I think I can figure it out.”

“It’s not as intuitive as you think it is. Not just this but the entire process of anal intercourse.”

“Please don’t ever say ‘anal intercourse’ again.”

“And there are other things you can do, you know. Penetration’s not everything. Men are always trying to stick their penises places when some skilled frottage or intercural sex will do the trick. And if you have any questions, I can answer them.”

“I think I’ll be okay.”

“Jim—”

“Nurse Chapel, I do know how this goes. What guys do.” He gave an insecure little shrug. “So, I’m gonna be fine and you don’t have to worry.”

The turbolift doors parted on the officers’ deck and Chapel walked side by side with Jim to the captain’s quarters. At the door, he turned to her.

“Really,” he said. “No worries.” He gave a perfunctory, strained smile, waiting for her to leave.

“I’m coming in, Jim. You can’t get rid of me till I’ve shown you everything in this kit and embarrassed you some more.”

“ _This_ is what’s awkward,” Jim sighed, punching in his code and letting them both into his quarters.

*

Despite his enthusiasm, and his prolonged impatience when Spock made him wait until after dinner, the time came to ‘test the hypothesis,’ as Spock kept calling their impending intimacy, and Jim was strangely hesitant. Hyperaware of his narrow shoulders and visible ribs, he felt suddenly shy around Spock, shy and unworthy and undesirable. His early morning gusto seemed far away, and so did Spock, who gazed at him over the chess board now, as indecipherable as the day Jim woke up in the wrong time and place.

“You are uncomfortable,” Spock said redundantly. Jim shrugged and looked down at his chess pieces unseeing. “If you would prefer, we do not have to engage in sexual relations tonight, or at all. The science team and junior medical personnel are still analyzing your case and searching for a rational solution. We can wait, and Supreme Empress H’Lopia will recover from the disappointment.”

Jim could not hold back a smile, though it came out wan. He mustered his courage. “How about we just go to bed and see what happens?”

“Jim, I am not interested in an encounter that would be detrimental to your emotional well-being.”

“But I feel better in bed with you. You know? Less thinking, more feeling.”

Spock’s eyes betrayed his uncertainty, but he rose and passed into the bedroom nonetheless. They divested themselves of their clothing, Jim convinced Spock to forego his modesty robe, and they settled into the bed with Jim’s head on Spock’s chest, the stars blazing in space just outside the window. Nimble fingertips carded through Jim’s hair, and tranquility stole over him.

“See? This is nice,” he said.

“Indeed.”

“No excitement on the bridge today?”

“I performed the Heimlich maneuver on Ensign Chekov.”

“What happened?”

“He was partaking in a mid-afternoon fruit snack, pieces of which became lodged in his trachea when Lieutenant Sulu made an inappropriate innuendo about Ensign Chekov’s private life.”

“But he’s okay?”

“Affirmative. He refused to go to sickbay and spent the remainder of the shift unresponsive to the Lieutenant’s queries and apologies.”

“Are those two space married too?”

“They are not involved to my knowledge.”

“Hmm. Maybe they’d chill out if they were.”

“It is not my habit to speculate on the private lives of my fellow crew members.”

“Sorry.”

“It is of no consequence, Jim.”

Jim stroked idly through the downy black hair on Spock’s chest, thumb catching a delicate olive nipple.

“Spock?”

“Yes, Jim.”

“What was it like when you first had sex?”

When Spock didn’t answer, Jim shifted to look into his face. He met a furrowed brow and downturned mouth.

“It was… an experience I would not care to repeat.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I mean, did it hurt, or… You don’t have to say, if you don’t want.”

“It was not physically painful, Jim,” Spock said. He seemed to flounder for the proper words. “I was unaware of my own proclivities at the time. I mistook the feelings of admiration I held for a woman dear to me for romantic and sexual feelings. The result was a relationship that was disappointing and distressing. As time passed, it eroded our esteem for each other. Subsequent events led me to conclude that I am homosexual, and my friend and I terminated our romantic relationship amicably.”

Jim lifted a hand to trace Spock’s eyebrows, cheekbones, jaw.

“But we’re good together. No erosion?”

“Correct. We have occasional disagreements, but I would characterize our relationship as… highly satisfying and beneficial.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “Okay.” He laid his palms on Spock’s stomach, feeling the lean, solid musculature there. He leaned down to set the tip of his tongue against the target of Spock’s nipple, then he grazed it with his teeth, drawing a hitch in Spock’s breath. He splayed a hand on Spock’s right pectoral, moving downward to trace the line of Spock’s body hair with his tongue. He dipped into the shallow hollow of Spock’s navel, sucking lightly when Spock let out a quiet groan. His cock began to fill as he reached Spock’s groin and the thick, springy hair there. He’d been thinking about this all day, letting himself get half hard at the thought of stuffing his face full of cock. Spock’s penis was stirring in its sheath, thickening, the tender head peeking out of the opening. Jim nosed around in the hair around it, breathing in the musky scent with zealous appreciation. Spock’s legs fell open and his hands settled in Jim’s hair. Jim put his mouth around Spock’s sheath, using gentle suction, his tongue darting and flicking around just inside. Spock’s penis surged within its sheath, lengthening with surprising force, the sudden invasion of Jim’s mouth causing him to gag. Jim pulled back and tried to accommodate the entirety of the slick column, stretching his jaws wider. Spock’s hands on his head eased him off completely, and he met Spock’s eyes, lips still parted in welcome.

“Go slowly, Jim,” he murmured. “Do not take too much in your mouth.”

Squeezing the base of his own erection to stave off his excitement, Jim nodded and bent back to his task. He gripped Spock’s fully exposed, fully engorged penis, encountering a thin patina of viscous fluid, Spock’s personal store of lubricant.

“That’s convenient,” Jim said with a laugh in his voice, pumping up and down and finally feeding the velvety head into his mouth. He clamped his mouth down and sucked, but Spock hissed and went rigid, partially sitting up against the bulkhead.

“Gently, Jim. Be mindful of your teeth.” Spock rubbed his fingers along the base of Jim’s skull to soothe the admonition. Jim slackened his mouth, summoning up saliva to ease the passage. He wrapped both hands around the base of Spock’s cock, where his sheath had retreated. He squeezed his lover there, earning a pleased groan. More of the slick fluid welled up from the sheath, and Jim swept it up the length even as he used his tongue to whirl around the head, keeping up a moderate suction.

“Very good, Jim. That’s very good, you are, you are doing so well. You are extraordinary.” Spock was going breathless, on the verge of babbling or moaning or both, and Jim felt a hot swell of pride simultaneously with a thunderstroke of arousal. He whimpered around Spock’s girth, eliciting more fluid from the collapsed sheath and transferring one hand to his own cock, jerking it roughly, without finesse. He continued to jack Spock’s dick into his siphoning mouth, losing the rhythm sometimes, but too deep in the sensation to care. His jaw began to ache with the exertion of bobbing up and down, forced wide around Spock’s impressive cock, but the dull burn spurred him on, and he concerted his efforts to providing friction and suction at a frantic pace. The hand on his own cock flew, sweat began to trickle from his hairline, and he couldn’t contain a continuous whine from rumbling out around the cock in his mouth.

Spock sat up and extracted his cock from Jim’s grasp. Jim hummed a complaint, but Spock swallowed it in a deep kiss. Spock held Jim to himself as if devouring him, his tongue and lips consuming Jim’s entire being, lighting his spine as if with phaser fire.

Spock pulled Jim down to lie on top of him, their erections hot and needy and leaking against each other. Jim reached down to squeeze them together and broke away from Spock’s mouth with a gasp at the sensation, eyes wide and trained upward.

“Jim, Jim,” came Spock’s litany. “Jim, you will penetrate me now.” Spock’s hands roamed down Jim’s back and gripped his buttocks with an edge of force Jim found both painful and electrifying.

“Huh?”

“I wish for you to penetrate me. I will prepare us.”

Dazed, Jim paused to drink in the sight of Spock, debauched, lips swollen, cock slick with spit and lubricating fluid, legs akimbo. All his to suck and cherish and touch, and his to fuck apparently. He was not sure that was how it was supposed to go in the plan he was sure Spock had drawn up.

“But I thought you’d do me.”

“We must be thorough in our testing of the hypothesis, Jim. And, it would give me pleasure to have you inside me.” Spock dug around in the bedside table before producing a half-used bottle of lube. Jim sat back on his heels with his cock in both hands to watch astonished as Spock turned to one side, lifted a leg, and reached back with a long fingered hand to circle around the tight, pileous ring of his own asshole, massaging and stimulating it. Two lube-slicked fingertips breached the sphincter, and Spock gave an unselfconscious groan at their entrance.

“Oh, fuck,” Jim moaned as we watched Spock finger himself, stretching his asshole open and rubbing the greasy slick inside. He felt the inexorable approach of his own climax and squeezed the base of his cock mercilessly to halt it. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, Spock.”

Spock sat up and swatted away Jim’s hands, pouring lube onto Jim’s copiously weeping cock. He wiped the entire length with it before settling back into the pillows and gripping the backs of his knees to hold his legs open. His thick, heavy phallus lolled against his stomach unheeded, dribbling pre-ejaculate from the head and lubricant from the base. The sight of the winking, wet hole between Spock’s creamy asscheeks suffused Jim with a primal need to possess, to plunder, to ravage.

“Now, Jim. Please.”

Eagerly Jim shuffled forward on his knees between Spock’s spread legs, lining up his cock with Spock’s hole. The snubbed end of his cock seemed impossibly huge against the tiny anus.

“I… I don’t think it’s gonna fit. Oh God, Spock.”

“It will fit, Jim. You are not hurting me. Penetrate me now, Jim, now.” Spock rocked slightly and Jim surged forward, thrusting into Spock, forcing past the grasping ring. Jim bellowed at the tight, wet heat, Spock’s rectum clenching like a smooth, seizing fist around his aching cock. He gave a shallow thrust that devastated him. Spock’s hands swept up and down his back, tangling in his hair, fondling his ass. Spock licked the inside of Jim’s mouth, spread open-mouthed kisses all over his face, caught his lips between his teeth. With just a few more plunges into Spock’s wringing rectum, Jim began to wail, powerless to stop the needful sound, helpless against the crashing tide of his climax.

“Fuck, oh fuck, Spock, I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m –” Jim’s shout rent the air as his entire body jerked with the effort of emptying his balls into Spock’s ass. He thrashed through the reverberations until he sagged, spent, into Spock’s open arms.

When he roused himself from his stupor, Jim became aware of Spock’s hands rubbing his back. He was also aware of Spock’s scorching cock throbbing, trapped between their bodies. He propped himself up and peered down at it.

“I’m sorry, I came really quick,” he said. He passed a hand over it, squeezing it in supplication and apology and affection. Spock trailed a hand down the side of Jim’s face, shaking his head in dismissal.

“You are exquisite,” he said. Jim moved so that he lay only partially on top of Spock, tilting Spock’s head down to kiss him with long, unhurried sweeps of his tongue, lips lingering at lips.

Their kisses subsided into lazy nuzzles, and Jim fought the urge to fall asleep.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hmm.”

“You’re still hard, and my ass is still all untouched-virgin-y. I got it all clean and everything, earlier. Would be a shame to waste it.”

Spock set his mouth against the pulse point in Jim’s neck, sucking lightly. He moved behind Jim’s ear, drawing out a whine.

“I suppose I would be remiss if I did not satisfy the conditions of my hypothesis within the given parameters,” he rumbled against Jim’s neck. Jim huffed out a laugh.

“It’s your duty as a scientist,” he whispered into a fine pointed ear. Spock covered him then, enveloping him in heat and strong arms and dizzying kisses. This is what he had craved for so long, someone powerful and heavy and unbreakable to lie solid against him, to own and absorb all that he was. He’d erupted wildly in the face of Spock’s submission, but Jim’s low-down primitive thump, the familiar compulsion to be taken that always pulsated along Jim’s spine, slavering eternally for consummation, now blazed in fulfillment as Jim gave himself over to Spock’s will. Spock’s hips settled into Jim’s own, that fiery pillar thrusting into Jim’s groin, leaving a trail of wetness from Jim’s stomach to his balls. Jim’s hands roamed ravenously over Spock’s sides, his smooth hips and firm, compact ass. Jim’s cock, young and fervent, stiffened under Spock’s weight. Jim brought his legs up to wrap around Spock’s back, grinding their cocks together, but the friction was minimal, the loose press of their genitals a maddening tease.

“Spock,” he urged, “come on, I need you, Spock. I need you to fuck me.”

With effort, Spock pulled back. He rose on his knees between Jim’s open thighs, stroking up and down Jim’s flanks.

“Jim, you must tell me if you wish to make use of Dr. McCoy’s muscle relaxant or numbing lubricant.”

Jim shook his head emphatically in the negative. “No, no I don’t want to dull anything. I want to feel everything, every bit of you in me.”

Spock nodded as if unsurprised. Maybe he’d expected that, knew exactly how Jim wanted it. The thought further ignited him, his ass throbbing in anticipation.

“Turn over, on your knees.”

Jim gave a thrilled little moan and scrambled to comply, propping himself up on his elbows and raising his ass into the air, spreading his knees. He felt Spock’s hands pass over his cheeks admiringly before spreading them, exposing his hole to the relative cool of the room. Jim buried his face in the pillows and moaned at the sensation, reddening at the thought of Spock studying the most private, intimate center of him like he would a lab report, his asshole quivering in reaction. Spock blew a light stream of breath over it, and Jim trembled and gave a shout. Then Spock’s face was there, pressed hot between his cheeks, inhaling the heady smell of Jim’s crack and ass.

“You cleaned yourself,” he murmured, snuffling around Jim’s perineum, his taint and hole, teasing.

“Fuck. Fuck, yeah, I did, Spock, do it. Do it, I’ve thought of this so much, God, please, Spock,” Jim begged.

Spock took mercy on him then, applying the flat of his tongue to his taint and laving up to bathe Jim’s hole, the tip flickering over the clenching muscle of his anus and the million sensitized nerve endings there. Jim keened, rocking his ass backward in wanton abandon.

“Fuck, yes, there Spock, eat my ass, eat my ass.”

Spock held Jim’s hips steady and proceeded to plunder Jim’s asshole, whirling the tip of his tongue around the outside and pressing inward, transferring saliva to ease the way. He thrust his tongue inside with indefatigable determination, loosening the tight ring incrementally. He sucked Jim’s asshole even as he snaked his hot tongue inside it, eliciting strangled wails and a litany of filth.

“Yeah, yeah you love that asshole, you love sucking my ass don’t you, Spock, yes, yes, God, keep going, fuck, I’ve thought about this, I’ve wanted you so long, Spock, yes, eat my ass,” Jim babbled, pushing his ass back into Spock’s mouth. Spock gripped his asscheeks and lashed his tongue to Jim’s hole, pressing deep inside as the twitching sphincter opened under his ministrations. He sucked the outer ring, grazing it carefully with his teeth, rubbing a thumb into Jim’s taint in a circular pattern. He massaged the sphincter with the tip of his tongue and it bloomed open in welcome. Jim’s words had devolved into high-pitched, needy sobs that echoed between the bulkheads. Careless of the undignified position, he settled onto his shoulders, face mashed into the bed, and reached back with both hands to spread his cheeks wider, rutting back on Spock’s wonderful invading tongue. Spock laid an arm across Jim’s lower back to help him along, working his tongue inside Jim with ease. When Jim’s asshole and crack were swamped with Spock’s saliva, and Spock’s tongue finally met no resistance as it plunged wholly into Jim’s deepest core, Spock eased back and set Jim’s hands back on the bed. Jim moaned, turning his ass up and rocking on his knees to plead for more.

“Don’t stop, I need you, I need you.”

Spock replaced his tongue with a long, slender finger, slick with lube. It rubbed the slack outer rim of Jim’s asshole before dipping inside and moving minutely between the quavering walls of his rectum. Accompanying it was a low burn, but the stretch and the width made him hum with satisfaction. Spock applied more lube and gave shallow thrusts in and out, then pressed tenderly along Jim’s inner walls, tracing the tubular sleeve of his rectum with gentle pressure to slacken him further.

“That’s good, Spock, fuck that’s so good,” he moaned, pushing back to encourage his lover. Spock slid in a second finger alongside the first with minimal difficulty, then twisted them and curled them inside.

“Fuck! Fuck, Spock there!” Jim screamed, heaving up onto his hands to gain better leverage with which to fuck himself down onto Spock’s hand. Spock had alighted on Jim’s elusive prostate and was pressing it with merciless accuracy. Jim wailed his exquisite pleasure, oblivious to his volume as he demanded “more, more, more, more, more.”

Spock accommodated him with the addition of a third finger, Jim’s ass clenching around the tighter squeeze.

“Jim, you must tell me if you experience pain.”

“No, God no, no pain, just keep going, keep going, Spock. You’ll fuck me soon, yeah?”

“Yes, Jim. Remember our conversation about patience.” Jim felt the slick pressure of Spock’s cock against his thigh, but Spock’s ministrations were leisurely; he seemed content to bring Jim to the brink of madness with his mouth and hands.

“Talk, Spock. Tell me what it feels like in my ass. Please,” Jim begged. “Please.”

“I am not skilled at ‘dirty talk,’ Jim.”

“Tell me anyway, tell me, tell me.”

“Your sphincter and rectum are tight around my fingers. The walls are smooth and lubricated and stimulate my fingers’ highly sensitive nerve endings. It inflames my desire to penetrate you with my penis.”

“Oh God, do it, do it, you should fuck me now, Spock, fuck me now.”

Spock was silent, pouring more lube over Jim’s ass and into the hand half buried inside, working it in without regard to the rude sounds that ensued. Jim pumped roughly at his seeping cock, all his swirling, shameful fantasies falling away in the face of the ecstatic reality of Spock’s possession of him. Soon, Spock would breech Jim’s deepest recesses, press his claim and his cock and his staggering devotion into Jim’s foundation. Jim knew that when he came with Spock’s entire being infusing his, he would gain back his freedom.

Jim felt the blunt head of Spock’s penis at his anus.

“Jim, this is more difficult than fingers. You must breathe and bear down.”

Jim did as told, a grunt passing his lips as the first inches of Spock’s thick cock slid into him. His hard on flagged, then wilted completely. He couldn’t distinguish between the burn of Spock’s dick and the burn in his ass, but his whole body buckled under the flames. He whimpered and pressed himself low into the bed, Spock’s penis splitting him too wide as he pressed in deeper. For a panicked moment, Jim felt like he might tear, like he might defecate, like his might scream and scramble away, but Spock’s hands were rubbing up and down his back and ass, soothing. Spock was in to the hilt, balls nestled against Jim’s, and he dipped a thumb into Jim’s crack to rub around his widely stretched asshole, lube and massaging pressure easing the searing agony.

“Breathe, Jim.”

Jim realized he’d been holding his breath and exhaled, relaxing slightly around Spock’s girth. They remained like that for long moments, Jim facedown on the bed with Spock kneeling behind him stroking his flanks, intimately connected.

“Are you well, Jim?” Spock asked when Jim finally felt like he could breathe without strain.

“I think so. It hurts a little, still.”

“I will be careful.”

With that, Spock gathered Jim up so he was on his knees, back pressed into Spock’s chest, Spock’s arms entwined around him. Spock trailed nipping, licking kisses between Jim’s shoulder blades, along his neck and behind his ears, before he drew Jim’s head back and kissed his open mouth, sucking on his lower lip. Spock’s hands wandered across Jim’s chest and stomach as if Jim’s body were a map of pleasure they were following. He cupped Jim’s genitals, Jim’s erection yet unrecovered, and began a gentle rocking motion that stimulated Jim’s insides without sending flashes of pain ricocheting between all his nerves. The hand unoccupied with resuscitating Jim’s erection came up to splay on his chest, fingertips on a nipple, teasing with the scrape of a nail. Jim sighed and began to roll his hips in response, cock stirring in Spock’s hand. Spock’s cock bumped Jim’s prostate, and Jim groaned, humping into the pressure, his cock filling fully once more. Spock stroked it through a few more easy undulations before Jim bent back down low to the bed to improve the depth of penetration.

“I’m ready now,” he said, pulling off Spock’s length a little and then easing back onto it. The burn was less intense, and the throbbing from his prostate lit his ass with a brighter, eclipsing rapture. Spock drew back and sunk forward slowly at first, rhythm steady and slow, letting Jim get used to him in his body. Jim gasped and whined each time Spock jolted his prostate, and he began to meet Spock’s thrusts, his own encompassing need soaring beyond thought, beyond rationality, beyond his sense of self. He felt like he had somehow merged with Spock altogether, that they were one writhing body reveling in its unity before the watchful stars. Spock sped up, sawing in and out of Jim’s ass, urgency mounting. He jacked Jim’s cock with just the right amount of punishing pressure, rammed into his prostate with precise aims of his penis, and then Jim was howling as he came explosively, pumping thick ribbons of come all over the sheets and Spock’s unfaltering hand. His thighs gave out, and he collapsed onto the bed, heedless of the mess.

Behind him, Spock was issuing his own series of grunts and gasps. Jim felt his ass flutter around Spock’s deeply buried cock, the powerful orgasm still resounding throughout Jim’s body. Spock stiffened and held Jim down with bruising force, giving a short, harsh shout as he filled Jim’s ass with a scalding flood of come. After Jim milked him dry, Spock was careful not to crush him as he sunk boneless into the bed, dislodging his penis from Jim’s hole with practiced care. Jim wrapped his arms around him in an instant, and they shared languorous kisses as they sagged against each other.

“That was intense,” Jim said after a few minutes of listening to their breathing even out.

“Indeed,” Spock agreed. He shifted to meet Jim’s dazed eyes. “Are you in any pain? Do you require Dr. McCoy’s analgesic salve?”

Jim grinned. “You need to stop bringing him up while we do dirty things to each other. I’m gonna have nightmares of him taking notes while we fuck or something.”

“Jim, I am being serious. I can apply the ointment if you experience discomfort.”

Jim regarded Spock with a heady burst of affection. He made a compelling image: a debauched Vulcan prince against the backdrop of stars. Jim felt immeasurably fortunate at having shared himself with Spock instead of the first lowlife to drag his narrow ass into the back of a barn, or alleyway, or truck bed. Then he felt the chill trickle of certainty that this was a temporary gift. He knew he’d have to cede to the Jim who belonged here, knew he wasn’t going to be able to stay much longer.

“Yeah. Yeah, why not,” he said, swallowing past the thickness that had gathered at the base of his throat. Turning a mischievous look on his lover, he added, “Maybe you can kiss it better, too.”

*

Spock roused at his habitual 0400 hours. He sat upright when sleep fully ebbed from his consciousness, and he looked at the shape under the sheets beside him. A conglomeration of emotions, illogical all, quivered at the edge of his mind, but he disregarded them. He tugged the sheet down to Jim’s waist, revealing the broad shoulders and sculpted musculature of his bondmate, restored to his proper age. Bubbles of relief and affection burst within him, and he allowed himself the luxury of giving in to them, touching Jim’s back as if to confirm his existence. Jim stirred, shifting onto his other side and squinting at Spock in the dark.

“Hey. Getting up now?” he asked, voice sleep-rough and deep. His eyes drifted back downward.

“I believe I will forego my pre-shift routine, today,” Spock answered. Jim cracked an eye and grunted, the sound a neanderthal expression of disbelief. Taking in Spock’s gaze, he was suddenly as awake as Spock.

“Why, what’s wrong?” Jim’s hands flitted over his torso, as if checking for injuries.

“Jim, do you not recall the events of the last 2.96 days?”

“Did you get hurt? Why can’t I remember?”

“I am unharmed, Jim. Cease worrying.” Spock held Jim’s fussing hands in his own, pressing them to his chest. He reached out to sooth the furrow from his bondmate’s brow. “We are both unharmed.”

“Did I take a blow to the head? Is that why I’m not remembering the last few days right now?”

“Allow me to explain. You regressed in body and mind to your sixteen year old self, but you have been restored.”

Jim sat back, still frowning.

“Oh, wow. I do remember that. But it feels like I did it a really long time ago.” He set a hand on Spock’s thigh, stroking through the hair, pensive. Then he grinned and jabbed a finger into Spock’s chest. “You! You totally justified sexing me up without any logic at all!”

“It was quite logical to follow my hypothesis to its natural conclusion, which happened to be intercourse. I will be informing Dr. McCoy of my superior logic before alpha shift commences.”

“But your hypothesis wasn’t based on logic!”

“There are many unknown forces in the universe, Jim, and one cannot apply reason where one does not have sufficient data. I contend that your condition was the result of one such force. This is not a failure of my logic, but a rational concession to the fact that all the workings of the universe are yet unknowable.”

Jim was half-pouting, half-smiling, a look that meant he was teasing him and Spock was somehow ‘no fun.’

“I didn’t mean to insult your logic, Spock. I just wanted to poke a bit of fun at you.”

Spock did not answer but pulled Jim to himself and settled them curled together back into bed.

“I am gratified that you have been restored, Jim.”

Jim linked their hands. They lay in silence for a seven minutes and twenty-two seconds, both ruminating on events of the past 2.96 days. For Jim, these events were thirteen years in the past.

“Spock?”

“Yes, Jim.”

“What you did was right. I mean, not just because it would undo the regression. But because it was the right thing to do for me, for how I was back then. Trying to find any way to self-destruct. I remember the things I did to erase myself with Mark and Hank, trying to get the pain on the outside to match the pain on the inside, but I also remember you, and how gentle you were. Like I was precious. So it was the good, right thing to do by me, Spock.”

“You _are_ precious to me, Jim. T’hy’la.”

Jim kissed Spock with invigorating facility, holding his face in both hands, and Spock allowed himself to be immersed in the turbulence of Jim’s lust, feeding it with his own. The 2.96 days since he had seen his bondmate in his rightful mind and body seemed a cruel, unacceptable interval, and he held Jim tightly, arching into his riotous affections. He lifted one hand to rest his fingertips on Jim’s psi points, and they were not separate but together, two consciousnesses cascading together in dazzling bursts of color. There was no gravity or direction, only blooming passion that sent them soaring through infinite space as one surging force, powerful and tender as the ancient and enduring sparks of love.

When they parted, lungs heaving for breath, they were splattered with semen and glistening with perspiration, Jim straddling Spock, foreheads resting against one another. They pressed soft, lingering kisses against each other’s mouths, intertwined their hands and lay back to spend the remaining hours until alpha shift absorbing the perfect serenity of their reunion.

*

McCoy pulled at the collar of his dress uniform, shifting his weight from foot to foot in the transporter room as he, Jim and Spock waited for Scotty and Keenser to arrive.

“Does the quartermaster do this on purpose?” he groused. “I feel like I’m suffocating in this thing. Why do we have to dress up anyway?”

“Cultural sensitivity, Bones. Didn’t you read Uhura’s debriefing?” Jim slapped McCoy on the back.

“The people of the outer rings place much importance on the appearance of wealth, doctor. We must enter negotiations on their terms to ensure the optimal outcome.”

“Yeah, yeah, I read it too, Spock. I don’t have to like it. And I certainly don’t know why they want the CMO in on the deal. Not like I’m eye candy like certain starship captains we could talk about.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Bones. I saw the way that goat herder’s harem looked at you.”

“You were invited, doctor. To refuse would be an unforgivable insult.”

Scotty arrived in a full formal kilt, while Keenser swam in the plain, sand-colored formal robes favored by the upper echelons his people, the A’Soroni of the Kynorbian Sun. McCoy boggled at them.

“Looking good, Scotty!” Jim crowed. “You regulation under that thing?”

“You’d better believe it, Captain!”

“Are you two serious right now?” McCoy seemed to address neither engineer in particular. “What happened to your dress uniforms?”

“It said fancy. This is the fanciest thing I’ve got,” Keenser said. He pulled at the fabric sagging around his hip. “Maybe I lost some weight and it doesn’t fit.”

“I don’t think that’s the problem. Scotty, is that a manpurse?”

“You’ve no sense of culture, Dr. McCoy,” Scotty said. “This is a sporran, and it’s gonna save our arses when the negotiations drag.”

“Hmmph, and how’s it supposed to do that?”

“I may have a wee flask inside.”

McCoy suddenly very much liked Scotty’s sporran, but Spock turned those judgmental Vulcan eyebrows on him.

“Lieutenant Uhura’s debriefing statement did not mention that imbibing alcohol while engaged in trade negotiations is traditional on Zenzobar of the Third Outer Ring.”

“Well, no, but me and this overgrown stalagmite are only there to beg for a few parts anyway. Had a bit of a mishap down in engineering, is the thing, and we’ve got loads of shiny things to trade. Show him the gear.” Scotty jostled Keenser, causing his robe to dip further.

“Quit it,” Keenser grumbled, jerking swaths of fabric back up. From somewhere within them, he produced a toolbox. When he opened it and the assembled trade team gathered round to peer inside, they saw only engineering flotsam.

“Um… Keenser, what is this crap?” Jim waved a hand over it.

“Stuff from broken sublight engines. We’ve got some ball bearings all polished up, a couple gold-plated gears, they’ll eat it right up.”

“You guys are gonna have to be on your own with those,” Jim said. “All right, let’s get this party started.”

The five of them took their places on the transporter pad. “Energize!” Jim called out.

Their atoms reassembled like drizzling rain in the Hallowed Hall of Bejeweled Glory. They were met by Supreme Empress H’Lopia, two aides, and a team of three advisors, all of them wrapped in sumptuous fabrics studded with sparkling gems in every imaginable color. The Supreme Empress was distinguishable by the gilded ring she wore around what appeared to be her head. The outer ringers were not humanoids; they resembled jagged cliff faces more than anything else, their slate-like exoskeletons assembled in segments to provide ease of movement, their gleaming eyes blinking out from fractures toward the tops of their bodies.

The Supreme Empress glided with surprising grace to meet the team from the _Enterprise_. Jim had his arm raised halfway in the traditional outer ring gesture of greeting when the Supreme Empress stopped in front of Keenser.

“It is my great pleasure to make your acquaintance, Captain James Tiberius Kirk of pleasing form. I am the Supreme Empress H’Lopia of Zenzobar of the Third Outer Ring. I hope my form exceeds expectation.” She spoke accented but precise Standard, her voice like sandpaper on a band saw. Scotty gaped at Keenser.

“Er – sorry, there’s been a bit of a mistake. I’m Captain Kirk,” Jim said, leaning in and breaking out the James T. Kirk Ultimate Smile of Seduction. Supreme Empress H’Lopia turned to him, scrutinizing him from his Starfleet boots to his deliberately tousled hair, the plates that comprised her face pinching inward in obvious disgust.

“I’m Lieutenant Keenser, engineering,” Keenser put in.

“Captain Kirk of abominable shape, I find you gravely disappointing. The text reports were not accurate.” Whirling to face her aides, she barked, “M’Harok of moderate attractiveness! I demand vid-feeds accompany all textual news from now on!”

Jim leaned in to whisper into Keenser’s hearing holes as the Supreme Empress continued to berate her staff. “You might have to take one for the team here, buddy.”

Keenser shrugged, dislodging his robes again, and it was possible he looked eager. Jim shared a look with Spock, who merely quirked an eyebrow. Scotty was wrist deep in the sporran dangling above his crotch, and McCoy inched closer to him in preparation. Spock came to Jim’s shoulder, whispering into a rounded ear the traditional outer ring apology he should offer the Supreme Empress.

“Madame,” Jim raised his voice and addressed Supreme Empress H’Lopia, interrupting her screed. “I apologize for the offense of injuring your eyes with my displeasing form. If you prefer, you may deal with Lieutenant Keenser exclusively.”

The Supreme Empress considered the offer for only a moment. “Captain Kirk of abominable shape, I accept. Lieutenant Keenser of pleasing form may choose one advisor from among you who offend my senses, and the rest may depart.”

Before beaming back up, Spock confiscated Scotty’s entire sporran.

The End  



End file.
